The Risks Of Having a Romance At Work
For your Coldplay concert's total enjoyment
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
One of the internet's best and most recent memes was related to the Astronomer's CEO and the Head of HR being caught in a romantic moment during a Coldplay concert. I won't go deeper into this specific story, but I thought it would be interesting to write an article about managing these kinds of relationships at work. I won't write an article on how to get a boy/girlfriend at work (this isn't that type of newsletter), but it would be interesting to look at these situations through a leadership lens and what I would advise to avoid.
Before jumping into the article, there are two different popular views about romantic relationships at work. The first finds it normal because we spend so much time with colleagues, which makes it normal to become friends and more. The second view, which I include myself in, defines a rigid line that excludes any kind of romantic interests in a work context.
I'm not here to tell grown people what they should or should not do (dramatic evil laugh), but I will just lay out the dangers and consequences of having this kind of relationship at work.
It Will End Up Badly More Often Than Not
And the love birds don’t even need to buy tickets for a concert for the relationship to go sideways! It can happen naturally.
I know couples who met at work and ended up married, but in most cases, the relationship ends badly. Projects already have too much going on, and the last thing we want is to handle broken hearts on the project team. The project will be an emotional rollercoaster on its own. There is no need to spice things up.
I have witnessed a case where a Business Analyst joined a team, and shortly after, she and a Developer started dating. A few months later, she switched to another Developer on the same team. At the time, the Team Leader was joking that on a team of five people, almost 25% of the team was in emotional distress. The guy was clearly joking, but managing people with personal conflicts within the team can damage communication and create unnecessary conflict. The go-to solution for these kinds of problems is to remove one person from the equation. So if someone were to have a love interest inside the same team, my advice is to prepare for a professional change in the short to medium term.
Erodes Credibility
Unfortunately, I have witnessed too many cases of romantic interests between a leader and someone on their team. In their minds, they want to keep it a secret, and they think it's a major success. In reality, everyone in the company is already commenting on their relationship near all the water coolers.
Leaders are asked to arbitrate between different viewpoints or next steps. Let's imagine the leader takes the side of their romantic interest. That's a biased decision. Even if the leader tries to do the right thing, it will still be perceived as biased from everyone else's perspective. The leader is hurting the credibility of their own decisions, and low credibility is seen as weak leadership.
Even if the romantic duo is on different teams, it's only a matter of time before they influence a decision where both of them are active participants. The company would have to be big enough for the two of them to never interact on work-related subjects.
Ethical Police (HR) Wants To Have A Conversation
There's a reason so many companies have a rule that prevents married couples from working together. It's an HR headache to address the potential ethical consequences, especially when it involves people in leadership. If a CEO is having an affair with the Head of HR, I guess that's okay in that company. However, in most companies, this raises major ethical concerns. How do you address the biases? The favoritism for a promotion?
When it becomes clear that something is happening and it raises ethical eyebrows, HR calls the people into a meeting. Eventually, someone has to leave the team, department, or whatever solution separates the leader's operational influence from their counterpart.
If both members are leaders, this is where I get my popcorn and wait for the feedback from HR, because that's not an easy mess to fix. The alternative is to pretend that everything is okay, which is the same as putting our heads in the sand.
It Can Create Turnover
Imagine working hard to get a role or a project, only to realize the leader plays favorites. We all know cases where people have left a team because they felt their career progression was blocked, all because Carol or John was romantically involved with the decision-maker. In some cases, 50% of the couple (a dramatic statistical approach to the argument) feels so uncomfortable with their girlfriend or boyfriend being connected to daily work decisions that they decide to move away on their own terms.
More often than not, it is an uncomfortable position for everyone and erodes confidence in the decision-making process, and eventually, the people who feel their chances are gone because of off-work interests will leave the team.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest it in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur