Workplace Romance: How Leaders Create a Culture of Consent

What should a workplace romance policy include?

When you read the job description for your role, it probably didn’t mention that you should prevent abusive romantic relationships from harming your team’s productivity. However, if you as a leader don’t give some thought to preventing that from happening, it probably will.

Here are some preventative steps you can take and some suggestions for what to do when prevention fails.

• Lead by example. Don’t get romantically involved with the people at your company.
• Put in place a “No sex, physical intimacy, or dating in your chain of command” rule. In other words, bosses who have sex or sexual intimacy with or date their employees (or the employees of their employees) must be terminated. When people violate this rule, which they inevitably will, the more senior person is the one who must leave a job, not the more junior person. To be fair and also to prevent undesirable behavior from powerful people, the rule must protect the less powerful. If executives do not create any penalties for senior leaders who date more junior employees but instead push all the penalties onto the more junior people, at least some of these powerful people will keep having sexual encounters with the less powerful.
• The most senior leaders at a company (the direct reports of the CEO and their direct reports) should not date or have romantic or physical involvements with anyone at the company. The theory behind this policy is that at a certain level of seniority a person has so much authority that sexual advances or relationships risk feeling coercive and/or abusive. That’s bad for the person coerced, and it also creates unnecessary financial risk for the company and a dysfunctional dynamic on a team.
• Enforce the rule. This may mean letting go of some leaders who are getting results. For example, the board of directors of McDonald’s fired the CEO when it emerged that he’d been sexting with an employee, despite the fact that under his watch the company’s share price had doubled.
• Leaders must disclose past relationships. After it was alleged that the McDonald’s CEO did not disclose relationships he was having with three other employees, in addition to the one that got him fired, McDonald’s sued him to get back the severance it had paid him.
• Don’t create environments in which abusive relationships are encouraged. One venture capital firm in Silicon Valley used to host two parties every holiday season: one for the wives and one for the mistresses. (There were no women partners or gay partners.) Don’t be surprised when your culture goes toxic in a damaging public way if you do things like that.
• Educate yourself. If you are not sure what constitutes an emotionally abusive relationship, here’s a simple definition: one person has power over another and uses that power to control or coerce the other to do things the person doesn’t want to do.

What if you’re the one with the power?

As hard as it is to recognize it when you are being abused, it may be even harder to recognize it when you’re abusing your power in a relationship, especially if you love the person, and/or are physically attracted to them. It may not be your intention to abuse your power. It may be the logic of the situation, logic that you may be unaware of because your power or your wealth or your privilege insulates you from facts that seem obvious to people in different circumstances. But it is your responsibility to be aware of the impact you have on others, especially if you care about those people, and/or have a sexual relationship with them.

For example, Nina, a friend of mine, asked Stanley, an executive at her company, to endorse her for a promotion. He admired her work and agreed readily. A couple of days later, Stanley asked Nina out on a date. She wasn’t in his chain of command, so technically, he wasn’t violating any HR rules. But given that he was writing in support of her promotion, he did have some power over her. And she simply wasn’t interested. After she politely declined, she called me, worried that he would withdraw his support for her promotion.

I knew Stanley reasonably well. I doubt it ever occurred to him that he had put Nina in an awkward position. But it should have. If he was smart enough to become an executive at a major tech company, he was smart enough to figure out this dynamic. Cluelessness was no excuse. If he’d taken just a moment to think about it (and all overtures of this nature in the workplace deserve that moment), he would have realized this was not the time to ask her out.

Here are a few guidelines to help you avoid becoming the abuser.

• Don’t get romantically involved with people who work for you or with people who are significantly junior to you in an organization. Don’t flirt with them, don’t allow them to flirt with you, don’t ask them out on dates, don’t touch them in a sexual or flirty way, at all, ever.
• If you begin to have romantic feelings for someone who works for you, ask yourself this question: Would you be willing to give up your job to pursue this relationship? If so, by all means, quit your job and ask the person out. If not, exercise the executive function that got you into this role in the first place to manage your own behavior. Do not announce your feelings and then expect the other person to clean up the situation you just created.
• If you wind up romantically involved with someone who works for you or is junior to you, it’s time for you to find a new job. Don’t expect or allow this person to sacrifice a career for yours. The all-too-common but flawed expectation of such situations is that the junior person is the one who changes departments or gives up their job. After all, you have the “bigger” job. But the other person’s career is just as important to them as yours is to you. And the person can likely less afford a career derailment, being the more junior with fewer resources.

These guidelines come from Kim Scott’s book Radical Respect, which covers how leaders can prevent bias, bullying and harassment at work.