A US tech company says its chief executive has quit after he was apparently caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing a female co-worker, in a clip that went viral.
The clip showed a man and a woman hugging on a jumbo screen at the arena in Foxborough, Massachusetts, before they abruptly ducked and hid from the camera.
The pair were identified in US media as Mr Byron, a married chief executive of Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the firm’s chief people officer.
The main issue is hiding it. Hes not fucking batman or something. Divorce your wife and get with the hr lady who gives a fuck, dont act like its some schoolyard secret.
The main issue for the company is that he’s having an affair with a person directly under him in the company - it’s a conflict of interest at the very least, with the possibility of the person higher up in the hierarchy having leveraged their position to get sexual gratification from their underling and/or of the underling having used their sexuality to influence that higher up in the professional domain (for example, to get salary raises).
Absolutely, they might both be impeccably professional and not let their romantic relationship influence their professional relationship, but the company doesn’t know that and it’s hard to disprove that it wasn’t so.
On the Moral and Ethical plan, the main issue is indeed that they’re betraying their respective partners in secret rather than having assumed their relationship.
Its entirely possible that if they disclosed the relationship to the board or whoever, they would have an arrangement where he doesnt have to quit.
True.
It boils down to how much they could keep their relationship professional at work even whilst romantically involved outside, and them keeping it hidden, whilst understandable, doesn’t exactly indicate to the board that they were professional about it (people who are impeccably professional about it immediatelly realised the potential conflict of interest and would have tried to address that risk and the impression around it, even if trying to keep it discrete).
Having come clean about it at least to some board members might have helped once the news came out because said people would have mentioned to the rest when the news blew up that they had been kept appraised of the situation, which might have helped. On the other hand it might’ve just guaranteed termination when they did come clean.
I had in my own professional career a situation which had the potential to explode (legal trouble, small but none the less some) and informed and kept my direct superior appraised of it, and when it did blow up and ended up in the newspapers (purelly by chance there was a freelance reporter there and the whole thing was “juicy” and a bit sleazy and made everyone involved look bad - great for gossip kind of news - so I guess that freelance reporter managed to sell the article to a couple of newspapers - good for her as she looked like she needed the money) I still got kicked out of my contract (I was a freelancer) because it made the company look bad. I was literally told that had the thing not ended up in the newspapers it would’ve been fine.
Thats a fair point to make although I would hold leadership to a different standard than freelancers.