When a leader inherits a business in crisis, what decisions can they make to steady the ship and drive positive change? The Honest Company CEO Carla Vernón and National Women’s Soccer League commissioner Jessica Berman riff on counterintuitive methods for gaining employee trust after public scandals and share practical advice on reframing strategy.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian and recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You each came into your leadership roles in crisis in a lot of ways. Honest Company was facing public scrutiny over some of its products. Cash reserves were dwindling. Jessica, at the NWSL, there were accusations of sexual misconduct around the team, and the league’s culture was talked about as toxic.
I’m going to start with you, Jessica. Those early days when you first get there, players are in revolt. Megan Rapinoe is saying, “Let it burn.” What do you do to address that from the start? I mean, I know you ultimately got a collective bargaining agreement that sort of changed the relationship between players in the leagues, but how do you get them to the place where you can even have that conversation?
BERMAN: Well, it’s definitely daunting to start a new job as a first-time commissioner, first-time CEO, and knowing that someone like Megan Rapinoe had just posted on Twitter, “Let. It. Burn.” And she was talking about the league . . .
It’s not a vote of confidence.
BERMAN: No. Well, the league was really at a crossroads, and the crossroads was: Do we go out of business and potentially restart? The history of this league is that there were three prior women’s professional soccer leagues that had failed. And so, that was a cycle that this sport had known before. And the alternative was that we go and hire a new commissioner and see if we could turn it around. And I think from my perspective, there were really two pieces.
First, I had a job when I got the call from the headhunter. So I felt like I could be very honest and transparent with the players and actually with the board of governors who hired me. I was asked to interview with them, and I sat with them and I said: “Do you see a world where you can trust this institution? Because if the answer is no, then I could be the best leader in the world . . .”
It’s not going to matter.
BERMAN: . . . then it’s not going to matter. And what I heard from the players was, while they lacked confidence in the league and had a very, very, very long list of gripes that needed to be addressed, that they actually did want the league to succeed. And what they expected was a leader who would show up with vulnerability and humility and actually join them in understanding their lived experience. And really respect and understand the labor relationship, and that the underpinning of professional sports in this country is the relationship between management and labor. And I’m a labor lawyer by training. Everyone always says, “Are you a soccer player?” I’m like, no, I’m a labor lawyer. And actually being a labor lawyer is what helped create the fabric and the culture that we have reset in NWSL.
Because you knew that building the trust was about having that relationship reset by this collective bargaining agreement, giving the players a stake in a different kind of way.
BERMAN: There is no business in professional sports without a constructive, productive relationship with your union and the players.
So Carla, you joined Honest from Amazon.
VERNÓN: Yes.
Much bigger entity. You ran a huge part of the business, all the consumables, household products, and food and beverage, and health and wellness and beauty. Then you come to Honest as the CEO, the team doesn’t know you, the business is kind of on fire. And so to gain their trust, you invoked cartoon characters. Why cartoon characters, and what was that about?
VERNÓN: Well, I feel like we have so much in common, Jessica, in our story. It’s important to back up and say, the Honest Company, for people who don’t know, is a very purpose-driven company. We were founded to really break up the personal care sort of old-school lens on things. So all of our products are very cleanly formulated to a high standard of clean. Which means we attract a very emotionally centered, purpose-centered employee base. And our employee base—66% of my employees are millennials or Gen Z, so they’re younger. So I knew that I couldn’t bring the tools that I had from old corporate America. I used to work at General Mills, a 150-year-old company. Everything that you could Google about taking a team through change . . .
Wasn’t going to work.
VERNÓN: Old corporate America is not going to work. So, I am a mom of teenagers, and I remember going to see Inside Out, the first movie, with my kids. And I loved, as a mom, how it told me about the different pieces of the emotional psyche, how genuine they are, and how essential they are to all of us. And so I thought that might be a less corporate way to help my employees feel normal about the change and the fear or excitement that they had about me as an outsider and what I represented. So this kind of became a bit of our culture.
Yeah, now you’re dealing with this sort of internal culture at the same time. You’ve got this cash flow problem that you’ve got to fix at the same time that you want to expand the reach of the brand. I mean, that’s a tough balancing act to, like, we’re going to cut back but we’re going to expand.
VERNÓN: It seems like it would be tough, but in a lot of cases, that old adage that you hear, “less is more,” turns out to be true in business. It is so helpful to define the core essential elements of what you are in business to do and what the people you serve really want from you, and in my case, from our brands. So some of the ability to say we are actually going to decide what we’re not going to do as much as we’re going to decide what we are going to do helped us to unlock the biggest pieces of our portfolio—the most profitable pieces, the pieces that were growing the most—and to really invest and focus in them. The other thing that we did, Bob, was make sure we had disciplined practices so that we just kept repeating and focusing on what was most important and not getting worried about the stuff that’s on the edges.
I mean, it’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do, right? Everyone’s, yeah, we’re going to be disciplined, but we all get distracted by whatever.
VERNÓN: But if you’ve ever worked at Amazon, you will learn how to be disciplined.