If she got promoted, would it be because of her work, or her relationship with the boss? If she didn't get promoted, would it be because of her attitude, or her relationship with the boss? If she had an argument with a colleague, was it because she was an entitled slut? If he cut the budget of the department she worked in, was it because he was going off her?
It's pernicious and there's nothing you can do about it except simply not sleep with the people you manage.
If a CEO of a blue-chip like Intel doesn't get this basic rule of management, what other basic mistakes is he going to make? Bring a gun into work? ;)
Of course not. If a manager runs a tight ship and treats their team fairly, then there shouldn't be anything wrong with a relationship. If as a manager you can't properly separate your emotions and friendships from your management duties, you aren't going to make a good manager anyway. The manager who is going to unfairly promote the person they are seeing is also going to unfairly promote the worker who they are best friends with over the worker who best deserves the promotion.
According to the CEO logic this should not be allowed and would not work. It does. Are teachers better managers than CEO's? Apparently. But then they should get paid accordingly.
I'm not sure if I buy this completely. You see, a manager is human after all which means he/she is going to like some people more than others. There is always some kind of relationship with all the others, no way around it. Now obviously if the manager is only going to look at this relationship, his/her personal affection for others and not their work, and give some advantages over others based on that relationship, yes that is bad. Seeing that, and seeing an actual romatic relationship is just a more involved type of relationship, 'simply don't sleep with the people you manage' is obviously not enough. You should be able to put all or most personal things aside. As such I think these rules of no romantic relationships are a bit strange. Even if you follow that rule, but for the rest still manage people based on your personal relationship with them, it's still bad.
Or looked at it the other way: If two people have feelings for each other but suppress resulting actions due to company policy, how would that not influence decision making?
The first is unavoidable, and although we try to correct for it in internal hiring/promotion processes by referencing assessments from multiple persons and making a data-driven decision, the second is completely avoidable by not dating the person!
After having graduated high school, most adults don't just fall into relationships. It is reasonable to assume intent is present once the connection between two individuals can be considered a "relationship" in this context.
This is why good managers don't aim to be friends with the people they manage. You may end up being friends because of team camaraderie and the amount of time you spend in the same building, but deliberately choosing to socialise with some (but not all) of the team is a bad idea.
And exactly the same thing happens if there is a perceived friendship in the team. Was the employee promoted because of their skills or because they're mates with the boss? Were they not promoted because the boss didn't want to be seen to be promoting a friend? Did they get into that argument because they're a brown-nosing jerk that thinks they're untouchable because they go for beers with the boss every Friday?
How can you argue or prove any relationship between boss and subordinate is consensual?
Why would you think that bringing a gun to work is a "mistake"? Does one's right to self-defense stop the moment they cross the threshold of their office door?
But your remark about the "moralising" of US companies has also been my experience. I worked in a Europe-based office for a US-owned multinational company. Alcohol was strictly forbidden. (Needless to say, the fridge was filled regardless and late Friday afternoon, people would have a beer and fraternize.)
If the board got wind of a pending investigation into that incident they might be looking to distance him from the company before the other shoe drops.
And there's no such thing as Friday afternoon beers in the fridge.
You really don't think so? I'm no CEO but I imagine carrying a gun around would at least warrant some public criticism, particularly for a tech CEO in the San Francisco Bay Area.
If you can tell they're not doing what you say, they're not doing it right.
The company is in Sunnyvale, site of the Richard Farley murders at ESL in 1988. So, yeah, I think the police would be interested in knowing his intentions.
These are short questions that probably can't ever be fully answered and require books to be answered even semi-adequately. That said, a good answer probably has some element of the U.S.'s strange relationships with sexuality and Christianity, going back to the particular kinds of European settlers who showed up here. This is often referred to as "Puritanism," although the Puritans actually had a much more complicated and less prim experience than is commonly supposed with the slur "Puritanism."
At the same time, in the last several decades (maybe 50 or 60), there have been various strands of feminism; two particularly noticeable parts could be labeled as "sex positive" (Camille Paglia is a good person to read on the subject) and... I actually can't think of a good label for the other one. But the other one actually has quite a bit in common with the old-school and religiously motivated views of sexuality as dangerous and in need of extreme restraint or channeling into "appropriate" spaces. This one has quite a bit of currency, currently, and it has a lot of continuity with past aspects of U.S. culture.
It's not just the specific act(s) but the fact that he knowingly broke policy, which raises the question of whether he decided other policies also didn't apply to him. CEOs have a lot of power and enormous compensation and, at least in theory, that's founded on their judgement.
Risk exposure to lawsuit is incomparable to the relationship case but it was consensual.
Not just in the US but almost everywhere people tend to extremize moral reactions to the point their judgement in a situation is being impaired. Generally morals are used to drive people actions away from cold rational reasoning, and they also make strong arguments during war time or elections.
Unrelated, but strong example: take a toy gun and a sex toy then ask 1000 people if they would let their children play with one or the other or both. Pretty sure all of them would say no to the sex toy in disgust (which would be my reply as well, just to be clear), but most wouldn't mind letting their kids play with the toy gun. That would be a pretty normal reaction, so no problem here, apparently. But we can also describe a sex toy as a device to simulate the act of creating a life, and a toy gun as a device to simulate the act of taking away a life, so the question would be: why our morals which rightly prevent us from giving dildos to children don't prevent us from giving them toy guns as well?
Or consider Mozilla's week-long CEO who years earlier donated $1000 to a popular ballot initiative supported by most California voters.
Be careful how you vote, citizen. Your livelihood depends on it.
Don't slip on that edge of political wrongthink.
Communism is certainly the most damaging political movement of the 20th century. Should we oust Communist sympathizers from their positions of power?
Why should the state be okay with two men getting married to each other and not two men getting married to the same woman? Or three women all getting married to each other?