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.
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.
I’m not really trying to pass judgment on the right or wrong of the situations.
I’m just pointing out that in my experience (not just personally but also for what I’ve seen with others) most companies will just ditch employees/“colaborators” if they can do so legally when some scandal involving those people hits the Press, quite independently of those people having done the professionally correct thing before it all became a scandal.
Being more of a well connected insider might protect one from this, but my impression is that the initial reaction is to remove the person connected to a scandal in the Press, and then maybe they’ll come up with some arrangement if that person has enough influence with the right people within the company, and I guess this guy - even being the CEO - did not.
(Obviously in my own situation, is was a freelancer hence easy to legally let go even in Europe, and with enough distance down the chain from the ultimate decision makers that even with my direct manager trying hard to keep me, they didn’t care enough about me or even him, so the outcome was pretty much guaranteed)