A
while ago, I was approached by a client to investigate a sudden management team
‘communication’ problem in one of his company's divisions. Once the rubble was cleared away, what was
left were the immediate and long-term effects of an office affair. Without going into the gory details, a very senior
manager was concentrating on studying anatomy, and his Executive Assistant (EA)
had a related and significant change in her opinion of herself and the
importance of her role as gatekeeper between the very senior manager and the
balance of his management team. Messy.
What struck me at the time quite
forcibly was the added stress others in the organisation had had to endure. Which also made me pause to consider the
potential commercial costs from the company's perspective.
I
came to an early conclusion: from an
organisational point of view - the best
outcome of an office affair is neutral.
That’s
it. The best outcome for a company from an affair is that there is no detrimental impact in the short and long-term. In all
other circumstances, it seems to me the company loses directly or indirectly.
I
would really like to hear of circumstances where there was a direct
affair-related benefit to the
company. I am excluding unsubstantiated (apocryphal?) claims of horizontal sales
successes, thank you very much. (Or to
put it another way, it would make for an interesting customer survey: “So you
can confirm that we only got the order because our sales rep slept ….” You get the idea.)
Point #1 - What
happens next?
In
a related aside, my then 15 year-old son demonstrated wisdom beyond his years
regarding why he would never go out with girls from his own school,
“If you break up, Dad, you are both still at the same school. You’ve got years of afterwards to get through. Not smart.”
(Such wisdom at such a young age .... must be his Mum’s influence…)
Most
affairs end. Some amicably; some due to one
partner rethinking; some just fizzing out; some by discovery. So in line with a 15 year-old’s wisdom is point #1 - What happens next? What about all those ‘afterwards’?
What are the odds both can continue to work as before, unscathed?
In the best case, yes. In all others, less than certainly. I wonder how frequently the reasons given for
someone resigning hides another truth: that an office affair never
ends (or for their spouses, is proven to
end) until there is physical separation/ no contact.
And for the company? It pays in lost productivity, and resultant associated costs of recruiting new staff,
retraining, etc. - that will probably be attributed to ‘natural’ turnover.
Point #2 - Impact on work colleagues can be subtle
and often difficult to assess or anticipate.
Back
to our very senior manager: he granted his EA a ‘significant’ salary increase (read: % greater than most) that given
the quietly growing knowledge of their relationship, resulted in some staff
being disgruntled about lack of fairness … and
some classic cracks about the latest innovation in how to conduct a
‘performance’ appraisal.
At this point, it was
irrelevant how well the EA completed her work (and opinions varied greatly on
that point): any salary review or bonus payment above the norm was construed as
undeserved.
So,
for the company, one unanticipated
impact of the affair? A degree of loss of
trust by staff regarding transparent fairness by management in how they [staff] are
treated and valued; that the performance appraisal system, for example, reflected work-based merit.
In this case, it got worse. The clearly-defined role of an EA became distorted due to an inflated sense of self-importance. The EA had been encouraged to consider her role as more than a diary gatekeeper - more like a gatefilter.
For managers, the EA was now unpredictable
and ‘politically dangerous’. Messages to the very senior
manager were correspondingly more cautiously expressed and subtly slowed as managers sought greater consensus prior to putting forward concerns or new ideas.
It was no surprise, then, that the problem presented initially to the Group MD as a management team communication
issue ...
With many circumspect office affairs, there is probably little if any impact on work colleagues; here it slowly became anything but ...
The inevitable was predictable once others started to pay a cost. I heard later that the EA 'decided' it was time to move on; the very senior manager found he had
lost the until then complete trust of the Group MD and some time later also left.
The whole episode, along with its associated costs, was filed away under
"one of the many unpredictable things
a CEO has to deal with
- the less said the better".
Cheers
Nic
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