Sex Scandal Toppled a Silicon Valley Chief. Investors Say, So What?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
You can date people at work, but you cannot date people in your reporting chain.
That means that if you're the CEO, you cannot date people at work. Tough shit, there's 7 billion other people in the world.
That being said, if both persons are mature and cautious, the sky will not fall.
It's unethical to make advances on someone you hold power over because there's an implication that rejecting the advances could harm their career and their working relationship with the superior.
Even if the two people in the relationship are fine with it, and there is no abuse of the manager-subordinate power dynamics, and all the other problems associated with this...
It can create the perception that the reason Sally is getting a good performance review, is because she is sleeping with the boss. This is absolutely toxic to a workplace, and irresponsible of the CEO.
> A year into SoFi’s life, the company’s board learned about Mr. Cagney’s personal behavior. In 2012, the board settled with an executive assistant who had received sexually explicit text messages from Mr. Cagney, The New York Times previously reported.
That is, in fact, behavior that should engender serious consequences. (Also lying to the board about it).
Also, there is no such thing as a CEO "just dating" a subordinate. It's incredibly unfair to the person involved (who might get into the relationship out of concern for what happens to her job if she reject's the CEO's advances).
Even if the relationship is totally on the up and up, it's unfair to everyone else, and in this case was a diversion of corporate resources for illegitimate purposes:
> he had used company resources to pursue a romantic relationship with an employee, the people said. Mr. Cagney said he had previously suggested that employee as a promising candidate for chief financial officer.
He was also misusing corporate funds to pursue subordinates, serially lying to his board of directors, and breaking a pledge he had made to them. That's the reason why he was "fired". It was not simply because he had an affair.
I was once told, “as the CEO your job is to keep the board completely snowed so you can run the company without interference”.
Honestly I thought this was table stakes in the valley.
I also find the implicit assumption that all people who break the current moral codes of the day (even if they did so in the past!) should be henceforth unemployable and the subject of social outrage.
Driving those changes will be technology like Tinder. By making the market for dating more efficient, it will reduce the need to permit romantic solicitations in other contexts.
It has also probably hindered the careers of some of the women who were my direct and indirect reports, but that's not my problem. I've been waiting for the legislation against those unintended consequences for a long time now. It's closer than ever, I can feel it in my bones.
You should stop doing that.
In fact, one of them is now a senior VP at a Fortune 100. I take no credit for that. She was extremely talented. OTOH, I certainly could have hindered her advancement but did not obviously. In fact I warmly recommended her for a promotion and later gave her very good references when she moved on to other companies. These were important steps in her career. Others have continued to advance as well, if not quite as spectacularly.
What I did say is that there are some who I did not help as much as I probably could have. They could have possibly benefited from some private coaching. I am not a crappy manager for not doing that. I am a good husband and provider for never allowing a situation to occur that could have put my career in jeopardy.
I didn't make the rules, the government (and especially the courts) did.
And calling me sexist is a cheap shot that only proves my point. Accusations are easy; proof is hard. This is especially true when you take a defensive position against the known risks of being falsely accused, as I have been several times.
Your edit to that last comment doesn't clear anything up. It's non sequitur logic. "I'm not a crappy manager, I'm a good provider"?
I never said I intentionally hindered the careers of any of them. When facing a choice of going above and beyond to help develop a female employee's career and risking my own career (and my family's well-being) by exposing myself to the very real and well-known risk of being accused of sexual harassment, I have chosen selfishly. (Here is where you tell us all how you would choose to risk your career to advance your female employee "because it's the right thing to do.")
It's exactly this sort of rhetoric that makes it difficult to have any rational discussion about how best to develop talent (whether men or women) in the current climate. The thesis that MeToo is more harmful than helpful is unpopular, I know, but thankfully no one has to defend its helpfulness because discussion of the realities involved is forbidden.
And then stop doing it!
It's a little weird that you think you have all the information you need to pass judgment on my career from a few short comments on an internet forum. It's even weirder that you haven't made any substantive comment or query on how that policy played out in real life, but rather resorted instantly to shrill pronouncements on my character.
If you can't look back over your career and see where some things you did might have been harmful to some of your employees, you either lack self-awareness or you never had any employees. I'm guessing it's the latter. You have way too many internet points for someone with real responsibility for other people's well-being at work.
Finally, I no longer manage people, so I have stopped doing it. I hope you can sleep now.
Did you also refuse to meet with men privately?
Edit: No, I don't socialize with the people at work. I have friends for that.
I think your advice is completely sensible for people who are a little more risk averse. Sad that such measures are necessary, but we all decide our acceptable level of risk.
(Advising people not to meet with anyone without a witness is not good management advice, for obvious reasons, but at least it's not unlawful).
Except you read it that way because you're biased to see bad faith and sexism everywhere. And look what happened: you uncharitably condemned and berated a fellow human being for literally no reason. And you're not even remotely apologetic for it. This pattern is sadly not at all exclusive to you, or uncommon.
As others have pointed out that this thread has gotten off-topic, I'll not be replying further. I'll merely suggest you learn from this mistake.
Right there - that's the sexist part. Do you believe there's an epidemic of vengeful women running around falsely accusing men of sexual harassment?
Because there isn't - but I'd love to hear your stories.
Rather, go make friends with someone who works in HR at a large company that employs lots of men and women. For this experiment, best not to try to befriend someone at your workplace. They may be hesitant to speak freely, since it could come back on them. HR people are nothing if not close-mouthed. At least the ones who last long enough to have good stories.
But lest you accuse me of dodging the question, I'll say that my personal favorite story is the woman who accused me of sexual harassment because I refused to remove a bad quality score from her record. (This was a call center, quality scores were only removed in very narrow circumstances.) She was three levels below me on the org chart.
I spoke to her exactly twice, in public, with several witnesses. She asked me to remove the score. I went back to my office, reviewed the call, and went back to let her know the score would not be removed. I was the final authority in any appeal of quality scores.
A week later I was informed by HR that she had accused me of sexual harassment. It turns out that she also contacted the FBI about me. Not even kidding.
But you might think that was a good idea. Hell, I might be a Russian bot sowing discord to affect the midterm elections and hasten the decline of America. I mean, I don't meet alone with women! Clearly that's un-American!
You should be ashamed of yourself.
That is what I was hoping to discuss: how some of the side effects of MeToo might actually be detrimental to actual working women, and what strategies might be used to change that outcome.
Instead, that comment only opened the door for a bunch of posturing and virtue signaling so that the wider audience knows without a doubt that those who reply are nothing at all like this sexist commenter.
I've explained further what I meant in another comment in this thread and it would be very tiresome to repeat it.
It is worth repeating, however, that your default response is to attempt to shame me, like other commenters here. Why can none of you provide a substantive response to my original comment? Do you really think all women are virtuous all the time, and all men are weak slaves to their sexual impulses so it must be true if they're accused?
Nowhere have I defended anyone who sexually harasses employees. (We haven't even touched the possibility that men can be victims of sexual harassment, but I don't have any faith that would be productive in this forum.)
No, I merely shared a strategy that was successful and legal, but I have been treated as if I were hitting on the women who worked for me and using them for my personal pleasure. I'm embarrassed for you, but I need to point out that that is the exact opposite of what I have done at work for the past thirty years. I have almost certainly furthered the careers of more women than all my detractors in this thread combined. Yet I stand accused, and that is enough to convict.
So which is it? Are all managers legally obligated to do everything in their power to ensure that women receive not just the same exact management that the men on the team receive, but also additional coaching that could be interpreted by certain unthinking people as sexual harassment if a woman makes an accusation? Because men have all the power and deserve to be brought down a peg or two, evidence and due process be damned? And besides no woman would ever ever ever make a false accusations, because they're not even able to do so if they wanted to, which they never would because they're all pure as the driven snow and anyway none of them would ever do such a thing, why are you blaming the victim anyway, you probably harass them all day and all of the night, you sexist pig?
Or could it be that I'm not the only one who has devised a strategy to avoid being torpedoed by a sexual harassment claim, but in the only one foolish enough to talk about it? Ah well, better to sweep any discussion like that under the rug, everyone else is at least as virtuous as the other loud public proclaimers of the correct philosophy. Move along, nothing to see here, sure hope China catches up to us in this category of virtuous living, hope this guys company fails, he's obviously a creep, I would never do anything like that nor do I know anyone who would, can't believe this guy discriminates, hope he gets sued and dies penniless, glad I'm not him.
You should be ashamed of yourselves for lacking the ability to reason without resorting to emotional name-calling and useless shaming tactics.
I'll back off just like everyone else will now that you've stepped in, but there aren't really two sides to this issue; someone said something problematic, and other people responded, perhaps heatedly but not unexpectedly or gratuitously so.
Fortunately most of the responses did just that (i.e. responded cogently without being aggressive) and were the more effective for it.
Are you arguing that women would never want a relationship with someone they met at work?
I know another Microsoft employee who is now happily married to his assistant. Office romances are very commonplace, I recall reading somewhere that 40% of married couples met at work.
Interested in your opinion.
BTW, if someone continues to ask for dates after being told "no", then I'd agree that is harassment and must stop.
Most of my socializing and friends come from work. What a sad world it would be if work was strictly for work.
I'd be careful taking it as an accurate picture of the 1960s. Hollywood pieces, even period pieces (and most especially period pieces) are creatures of the time in which they were filmed, not when they are set.
That would be right if only we didn't build a society requiring every non rich member to spend most of his non sleeping life at workplace.
Oh wait.
I mean, compare being at a place with like-minded people, people who likely share some of your interests, education background, etc. vs. swiping right/left for the 2-thousandth time so much so that you are fucking exhausted and questioning your self-worth after having been denied for months on end.
It's totally okay if you've started a romantic relationship at work. Just don't be an ass about it is all -- let HR know as needed, keep it professional, and all of the other obvious stuff.
- You don't need to be doing that
- You probably are not very productive working that many hours per day
This is not about some constitutional right to fuck your subordinates.
Case in point - Clinton/Lewinski. That was a textbook case of sexual harassment according to Federal regulations, except that Lewinski maintains to this day that the only abuse she suffered was from the media.
http://time.com/5130921/monica-lewinsky-now/
Monica's story doesn't "corroborate" anybody else's story about affairs with Clinton. She's not a witness to any of those others.
> poor definition
What's your definition?
Regarding the word "corroborate": "to strengthen by evidence" would do nicely.
> "to strengthen by evidence"
The Lewinsky case offers nothing to support other claims against Clinton. For one thing, Lewinsky never accused Clinton of anything. For another, she has no personal knowledge of the other alleged incidents.
There are even some people who feel my White House experiences don’t have a place in this [MeToo] movement, as what transpired between Bill Clinton and myself was not sexual assault, although we now recognize that it constituted a gross abuse of power.
The quotes I provided a link for. They happened.
> not sexual assault
And she repeats that it was consensual.
I hope.
Laws aren’t perfect, but they do tend to improve matters when society at large has decided that a behavior is harmful to others. Sometimes laws get it wrong, and then come under pressure to be repealed or changed. Laws against drug use for example, or laws against homosexuality not only tended to fail, but failed to target people for sound reasons.
There’s more nuance here than just “laws regulating ‘natural’ human behavior don’t work.”
I don't believe this is a difficult concept to distinguish these behaviors.
That’s what you actually said, and what I responded to. The normalcy of a behavior isn’t an argument in its favor, goalpost movement aside.
Read Sexual Sabotage by Judith Reissmann. It's a reframing of Kinseyism and the Sexual Revolution, showing that the sexual statistics on Adultry, Pre-Marital Sex, and Homosexuality which precipitated the Sexual Revolution, were colored by massive selection bias, and motivated by Kinsey's own rather perverse proclivities.
EDIT: I'm not calling you a liar. I'm just saying that the societal narrative that any of the things that you're suggesting were always prevalent is not so. Another book worth reading is A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Cannon Gibney. There are statistics on marriage and divorce between the Greatest Generation and the Boomers that are insane. The average GG partner count was 1; the average for Boomers was 15, and has been going down ever since.
I read a lot of history books. A lot of these behaviors are mentioned in passing. For example, in "D Day Through German Eyes" by Eckhertz, fraternization with french women was forbidden by army regulations. That seems to have stopped nobody, as it was rampant so much that orphanages were set up to care for the resulting kids.
Of course, that isn't statistics, and it would be pretty much impossible to turn that into statistics, but to say it is a lie is not warranted.
It's fine in the workplace, lots of couples that I know have met in the workplace. Just not between superiors and sub-ordinates.
But I think banning all relationships between a boss and subordinate is stupid. Someone close to me got into a relationship with their boss a few years ago. The problems my friend was facing wasn't that they felt forced into it, instead, what my friend talks about is how it was everyone OUTSIDE of their relationship that's making them uncomfortable. Some of my friend's coworkers think that they didn't get into a relationship because of romantic reasons, but because of financial reasons (but in a more blunt and straight up insulting way). It's frustrating how people are so judgmental (even in different ways) just because of the position the two have.
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but telling a story about how people commonly drawn the inference that the participants in such a relationship are engaging in an improper sex-for-job-rewards exchange with toxic effects on personal and working relations is an odd choice to support that claim.
I'm going to have to disagree on your last statement too. "it's not appropriate in the workplace". People do meet at work. Bluntly hitting on someone is not socially acceptable and could even get you fired but minor flirtation happens all the time. I think that's a gray area and not likely to go away.
I don't know that "women are renegotiating" anything so much as twitter people and bots are taking extreme positions (on both sides and not just on this issue). I think this is just one case where more nuanced, moderate discussion gets turfed in favor of extreme, us-against-them position taking.
The root of the problem is the fear of losing one's job. I think what should happen is that anyone can say "no" to an advance without fear of repercussions, not forming moral laws for where you can/can't form romantic relationships.
Is this "I worried I might get fired if I didn't sleep with my boss" thing really a serious concern at most well run companies these days?
Why is the most upvoted comment on this article a false characterization of this executive's conduct that downplays its severity?
Okay...? If that's literally the extent of what they found then this is kind of a non-story. Calling it a "sex scandal" is even quite clickbaity in my opinion.
Like, yes, there is a conflict of interest. Potential for abuse or coercion. But nowhere does it say any of that occurred, meaning this was just a routine violation of workplace rules. Absolutely mundane. I'm very much siding with the investors here.
Again, don't know this person. For all I know, they deserve to be lambasted. This article, though, falls short of making that case by a great deal.
The tone of the comments on this thread so far is basically: if I can’t lie, embezzle, break multiple company regulations, and expose both myself and the company to sexual harassment charges, how am I ever going to meet Mrs. Right? I hope you understand how insane that is.
Then it's embezzlement scandal, not sex scandal.
It goes into much more detail on the circumstances of Cagney leaving SoFi. The "romantically involved with an employee" phrasing in this article makes it sounds like he was just dating an employee. I think that weakens the point that's trying to be made, since many people don't equate "dating an employee" with "sex scandal". The earlier article raises additional concerns suggesting that dating one employee was not the only problem.
Mr. Cagney reversed himself after Sullivan & Cromwell told the board there was ample evidence — in emails, hotel receipts and the manifests of private jet flights — that he had used company resources to pursue a romantic relationship with an employee, the people said. Mr. Cagney said he had previously suggested that employee as a promising candidate for chief financial officer.
At Aflac, this would have been a firing offense both because he was her superior and because it was an illicit affair. I am a little weirded out that the company seems kind of okay with it being an illicit affair. The article indicates he wasn't breaking any rules at the time for seeing a subordinate. That rule was added later:
SoFi also instituted an ethics policy that explicitly prohibits intimate relationships between supervisors and subordinates.
I felt I had doors close in my face at Aflac due to the romantic interest of powerful men there, though none of them were breaking any rules or harming their own career. Even without getting involved, in one case just asking me out made me feel like my hopes of transferring to the same department had just died.
I don't have the answers. I'm currently doing freelance work and feeling like everyone in the small town where I live is off limits romantically. Because things get tricky once you introduce that element and it can close doors that you didn't know you might want or need to go through.
The investors who chose not to comment are pretty cowardly, IMO.
> In 2012, the board settled with an executive assistant who had received sexually explicit text messages from Mr. Cagney, The New York Times previously reported.
If his past conduct required settlement payments to a target of his advances, will that repeat in a new company?