Workplace Doctor: Colleagues in Dubai office having an affair

Married colleagues who had an affair should have considered the consequences of their actions first says workplace expert Roger Delves.

A married senior manager in my company is having an affair with a female colleague on my level. It was the subject of much gossip and speculation on the office floor for some time. Now the affair has been exposed and the board has become involved. I fear that my colleague, the woman who is also married, is the one who is going to lose out. She has already been told she may lose her job. Is this fair, particularly if the other party retains his role? AN, Dubai

I am a bit taken aback that you ask about fairness. Isn’t it the case that all is fair in love and war? OK, that is a little tongue in cheek, but fairness is not something that we can apply here and there as we see fit. Was it fair on the partners of this married man and married woman for them to start an affair in the office? Did they get permission from their partners or did they deceive them? Is that deceit fair? Was it fair of the two of them – one a senior manager – to conduct an affair in such a way that others knew about it, making them complicit in the inevitable deceit?

You say “the affair has now been exposed”, by which I understand that the organisation will take a dim view of it. That’s a point worth examining. In many parts of the world, and in many organisations, affairs are considered private matters unless they affect the work of those involved or of those on the periphery. This is clearly not the case here, which suggests that both individuals knew the risks they were running in conducting this affair. Simply put, if you get caught you get fired. If you know and understand the risks attached to a course of action, and you undertake that action anyway, don’t you at least implicitly accept the consequences if you are discovered?

You also say that your married female friend is the one who is going to lose out. I guess by this you mean she will be forced to leave the organisation while he, the senior figure, will be allowed to stay, even if he is given a proper dressing down by his bosses and told he is on a final warning. This is part of the same calculation at the start of the affair. Your colleague must have understood the risk she was running. If discovered having an affair in an organisation that cannot be seen to condone such activities, she as the junior employee is always going to be more vulnerable.

Being the female in the relationship will hardly reduce that risk. So all of this, surely, would have been part of the risk analysis she undertook before embarking on the affair.

There may also be other more far-reaching consequences, relating to her family and her marriage. These too were presumably considered before the affair was begun.

But of course we are only human. We discount risk in the face of temptation, ignoring future consequences for current pleasure or opportunity. The context here is that of an affair, but we make these same calculations in relation to much else that we undertake at work. I know many an individual who has taken a risk, not because the consequences were understood and properly weighed, and the risk assessed and deemed acceptable, but because the immediately available reward held more attraction than the possible future risk held fear.

Temptation, as they say, is the perverse imperative. If you let yourself be driven by that imperative, your decision-making will suffer and the consequences of your poor decisions will be visited upon you and on others around you as well.

We can’t all be expected to make good decisions all the time. But we can be expected to make decisions which reflect the reality within which we operate. It seems that this couple failed or refused to acknowledge the almost inevitable fact of their exposure, failed or refused to consider the implications of that exposure and therefore now may be repenting at leisure.

Doctor’s prescription:

We are all responsible for our own decisions, so let’s make decisions we can justify and ones we can stand over with pride.

Roger Delves is the director of the Ashridge Executive Masters in Management and an adjunct professor at the Hult International Business School. He is the co-author of The Top 50 Management Dilemmas: Fast Solutions to Everyday Challenges. Email him at [e-mail] for advice on any work issues.

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