Risk assessments for office romances

Perhaps the most celebrated story ever about a love affair is Anna Karenina  and the story doesn’t end well – as the distraught heroine throws herself under a train.  Office romances typically don’t end that way, but they are not without risks – particularly those involving senior leaders.

This is indeed an oft-told tale. Here is an earlier post on “frisky executives” discussing one such case from 2012.  Others around that time involved the CEOs of Lockheed Martin and Best Buy. And the latest in this line concerns the CEO of Johnson Controls.

As described in this article of a few weeks ago in the Milwaukee Business Journal, that CEO “failed to inform the corporation’s audit committee about the potential conflict of interest in his extra-marital affair with a consultant hired by the company.”  The net result: a reduction “of his annual incentive performance plan payout to $3.92 million, down nearly $1 million.”

A few thoughts on this case, perhaps of use to any CEO conducting a pre-office affair risk assessment.

First, while the economic hit is high it seems justified for a high ranking official – anything less could be seen as a slap on the wrist. Indeed, one of the cases discussed in the “frisky executives” post also involved a million dollar penalty. So, don’t expect economic leniency.

Second, consider the risk to the other party. In the case of the Johnson Controls executive, she was a consultant in a firm that lost an apparently long standing client in the scandal. No surprise there either.

Finally, while disclosure is necessary it may not be sufficient to prevent harm.  That is because even if an actual COI can be avoided the appearance of a COI might be inescapable – as the natural suspicion among others in the workplace could be that with the relationship comes workplace favoritism. For more on how some  apparent COIs simply can’t be mitigated by disclosure see this post.

(Thanks to COI Blog reader Don Bauer for letting me know about this story.  And, happy new year to all.)