Liane Hornsey, head of human resources for Uber, and Mary Mack, head of community banking at Wells Fargo, spoke on a panel earlier this month at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit.
Three weeks after joining Uber, Hornsey confronted the fallout from a former engineer whose public blog post shined a light on sexual harassment at the firm. Employees were “literally viscerally shocked,” Hornsey said as she prepared to deliver her remarks amid the fallout.
Hornsey instead determined that employees did not need to hear her speech, and just listened and invited employees to send questions and concerns to her with a promise to respond in 48 hours. Mack personally visited almost 55 of Wells Fargo’s markets in the last year and spoke with employees about what went wrong and how to remedy it following a phony account scandal. Being able to put the scandal in perspective also was important.
“These are solvable problems,” Mack said. “In our personal lives, many of us are struggling with problems that are not solvable.”