Alberta Venture | Cupid Makes His Call

Cupid Makes His Call

February 01, 2010 Category: The Right Call Tags: Corporate Ethics, Fil Fraser, The Right Call

Question: Is an affair between co-workers any of your business?

by Fil Fraser

As Valentine’s Day approaches, it has come to your attention that a married senior member of your team is having an affair with a staff member a little further down the management ladder. They are quite discreet around the office, but since the annual Christmas party the relationship has become an open secret. Because the senior member is in a position of power, is the potential for the sharing of confidential management information an issue? Is there the potential for accusations of sexual harassment in the offing? What happens if or when they break up? If they marry or move in together, can they both continue with the firm?

The Panel
Linda Banister: CEO, Banister Research & Consulting Inc.
Heather Douglas: CEO, Calgary Chamber of Commerce
Stephen Murgatroyd: Chief Scout and CEO, Innovation Expedition Inc.

Linda Banister: In the case that you have presented, with a married person involved with someone further down the corporate ladder, I would question that person’s judgement and ethics. No person who is married should be having a relationship with anybody else. You never know what’s going on in someone’s married life, but I think that the situation sets a very poor example. It really puts the judgment of both of them into question. I don’t think of this as gender-specific. It’s not uncommon these days for the woman to be in the senior management position.

Heather Douglas: In my experience, when I have a senior member of my team who gets involved romantically with a person that reports to them or in an area that they have influence over, it can create a lot of jealousy. It sometimes creates deceitfulness because people are trying to be discreet. I usually bring the senior person into my office. Too often in the past, the person in the position of power has been the male and the person in the position of lesser power or influence has been the female.

Stephen Murgatroyd: I have lived this situation too many times as a CEO or senior executive. My harsh reality is that it will never be in the interest of the organization to permit this to continue. One of the two has to go from the same area of the business or leave the company. It may seem like a harsh view, but experience shows that such relationships affect the climate of trust and the veracity and quality of decision-making in the organization. They also send a strong message that it is OK to set aside ethical guidelines and best practices.

Banister: The kind of policies a company should develop can depend on the nature of the organization, for example whether it’s a public or a private company. A key component is that the senior person cannot be favouring the junior person with promotions and other advantages, real or perceived. The two people should not be working in the same sector. All of this should be written clearly and directly into the company’s human resources policies.

Douglas: First, the president and CEO should consult with both legal and human resources to discover the rights of employees and management under federal and provincial legislation. You have to fit within human rights legislation and within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But for me, it is about a discrepancy of power, and the person with the most power needs to do something about it. It can also be about the inappropriate exercise of power.

I tend to say that the person with more power and influence either needs to break off the relationship – and that’s their choice – find a new job or be redeployed within the organization if it’s large enough. Because at some point, that person will be in a conflict of interest. You want to save them from potentially making a bad judgment for themselves, the other party or for their business unit. If that’s not possible, I will accept a person’s resignation.

Murgatroyd: There’s nothing worse from an HR executive’s point of view than being threatened with a Charter-based legal action to get them to back off, even when there’s a clear and explicit policy. The impact of the Charter is more perception than reality, but that’s sometimes enough to affect the situation.

I had a situation in which my own executive assistant was having an extramarital affair with a senior employee whom my board was wanting me to remove from the company. Imagine the issues this caused! In another situation, the person I reported to was having an extramarital affair with someone who reported directly to him. To help him out, he asked if it could look as if the lady in question could report to me, but in reality he would call the shots. In a third situation, an office romance, which both parties said was not serious but just sexual, led the husband of one of the two to find the male party and serious violence ensued. In the subsequent legal case, my organization was chided by the judge for not acting decisively. We also lost the skills of the male employee for four months while he recovered from his injuries.

These are the kind of messy and troubling situations one can get into.

Banister: If somebody in my company was doing that, it would be a key deciding factor as to whether or not they were permitted to stay in my organization. People have trust in what we do, and I don’t think that if the affair became common knowledge it would lead people to feel that we were not trustworthy. They probably would not be in my firm. You have to make hard decisions on the basis of what is best for the organization.

On the other hand, it’s not always about the more senior individual abusing their power. It can be a case of a junior person taking advantage in order to get a step up. Not every situation is the same. There are many organizations where a husband-and-wife team are the senior executive team. In one organization I know, there is no dating or living together or being married permitted. Basically companies need to have good governance and good policies.