Love's Labor

Managing the executive affair

How should management react when a man and a woman, both competent and successful executives with the firm, fall in love? The answer is interesting enough, but so too is who is asking the question: the September/October issue of the Harvard Business Review, the premier American journal of management. Sandwiched between an article titled "Product Defects and Productivity" and one on "Cutting Down the Guesswork in R & D" is a piece on how to handle love and sex in the executive suite.

Author Eliza G.C. Collins, a senior editor of the HER, observes that the influx of savvy, intelligent women into managerial ranks has set the stage for high-and medium-level love in American business as never before. Among Collins' examples are male executives in their 40s, secure in their careers but with wives at home whom they long ago left behind emotionally. Along comes temptation in the form of "senior females who were not passive but powerful equals ... sources of acceptance and love but also people who understood--and did not try to pull them away from--the executives' worlds."

To males, the lure is almost irresistible, and all the corporate credos against intracorridor alliances melt away. Daniel, the group manager, flips for Sheila, the assistant to his vice president. Judith, the vice president, and Sam, a higher-level bank manager, become entangled. A law-firm associate is drawn to one of the partners. Writes Collins: "Opportunity and need eventually wore down prudence." The author describes the cases in prose that resembles True Confessions more than the normally staid HBR.

The affairs, says Collins, present an entirely new problem that goes beyond the old-fashioned one of a boss going to bed with his secretary. The new romances can pose difficulties for both men and women managers. When an affair eventually runs into trouble, the women executives have two reasons to be very, very angry. "Each woman had sacrificed a personal life for her career; now they seemed near to sacrificing their careers for threatened relationships." The men too face quandaries. Writes Collins: "Caught between loyalty to his subordinates and the woman he loves, the male executive begins to feel a way he hasn't felt in a long time: out of control."

So how should top managers deal with this problem? If this appears to be a "purely sexual, transitory affair," the best advice is to ignore it in the hope that one executive or the other "will soon tire of the romp." True love, whatever its virtues, is a more difficult issue. Collins' ultimate solution is for the lower-ranking executive to leave the company, although the person should be given help in finding another job. Writes Collins: "Coming to the recognition that someone must go is painful but, I regret to say, inevitable." Collins concludes that unresolvable conflicts of interest will exist within the firm if both executives stay. She admits that in nearly all cases, this still means that the woman leaves, because female executives generally hold lower posts. Moral of story: Do not play where you work. But if you must, get promoted first. P: This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.