Why the Astronomer CEO’s Viral Mistake Matters for Every Leader

Episode #360 Why the Astronomer CEO’s Viral Mistake Matters for Every Leader

DON’T JUDGE – KARMA IS RELIABLE!

The German word, schadenfreude was invented precisely for this situation. It means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune – and the internet has been absolutely brimming with schadenfreude over the last few days.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, last Wednesday night, Coldplay held a concert at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots NFL team, which is just a few minutes up the road from where I live.

Virtually all professional sports stadiums over here have massive screens called jumbotrons. They’re awesome for close-up shots and replays, and they provide a much better view of the game if you’re in the cheap seats.

During stoppages in the game, the production crew will typically keep everyone entertained by projecting images of people in the crowd on the jumbotron. If you’ve ever spent three or four hours in the driving snow at Gillette watching the Patriots take a beating, you’ll know how welcome those jumbotron breaks can be.

But at this concert, two people ended up on the jumbotron who clearly didn’t want to be seen together. So desperate were they to avoid the prying lens of the camera that Coldplay frontman, Chris Martin speculated that they must be having an affair.

Until that moment, most people had never heard of Astronomer, the New York-based AI company. But it turns out that the two people on the jumbotron cuddling up lovingly to each other were the company’s CEO, Andy Byron, and Chief People Officer, Kristin Cabot.

I don’t like to make moral judgments with things like this. Everyone has to make their own choices about how they live their lives, and then they accept the consequences, be they good, bad, or indifferent. I also have an unshakable conviction that karma is reliable, so it’s certainly not for me to judge.

For the purposes of today’s newsletter, I’m not going to indulge in the finger-wagging that’s dominating social media, from TikTok to LinkedIn. Instead, I’m going to dissect this cautionary tale from a leadership and business perspective – and there are quite a few angles to explore.

YOU NEVER KNOW OTHER PEOPLE’S SITUATIONS

I want to start with a little caution on making moral judgments. Let me paint an alternative scenario to the mainstream assumptions that everyone has been making about this alleged affair.

I have known colleagues in very senior and high-profile positions who’ve made front-page news when revelations of infidelity have surfaced.

In one particular case, a colleague of mine had decided with his wife that they weren’t going to remain together, so they came to an understanding with each other.

Although their relationship was effectively over, they agreed to stay together for the sake of appearances… you know — live under the same roof, attend the cocktail parties and gala dinners together, opening night at the opera and so on…  but they agreed to discreetly move on with their respective lives.

As it turns out, when this colleague moved on with his life, his wife didn’t think his choices were in the spirit of their agreement, and it all blew up. When the news broke, a tsunami of judgment and ridicule came his way.

But think of it from this angle: If the two people involved were so unclear about the boundaries of their arrangement, what chance did the public have of understanding and assessing it?

It reminds me of a classified ad I saw years ago that was doing the rounds of the internet. It was hilarious.

A guy was selling his motorbike. It was almost brand new, with less than 100 miles on the clock. It was a Ducati 1000 – a high-end bike.

The text of the ad went something like this. After the specs for the bike the ad said,  “Must sell due to misunderstanding with loving wife. Apparently, do whatever the hell you want doesn’t mean what I thought it did.”

Let’s put aside our judgment for now. It certainly isn’t how I choose to live my life, but I get why some people might decide to do things differently.

In the case we’re exploring today, we have absolutely no idea what the circumstances and the intent of the Astronomer CEO and CPO might be, but we do have to be mindful of the likely consequences… and in this case, they are many.

HUBRIS IS YOUR ENEMY

I want to start with a word on hubris. For a start, going to a public event in a stadium with a seating capacity of 65,000 people is a pretty bold move.

As you probably know, I’m a huge fan of irony. Just a couple of years ago, Patriots owner Robert Kraft funded a $250 million upgrade to Gillette, including a state-of-the-art curved video screen at the northern end zone. This screen measures 370ft x 60 ft. That’s 110 metres long and 20 metres high.

Picture this (if you’ll pardon the pun). You don’t want to be noticed, but you attend an event at a stadium with one of the largest and highest resolution screens in the whole of the USA. Doesn’t really leave much wiggle room to run the “it wasn’t me” defense.

What is it that encourages people to take these risks?

It could well be a case of optimism bias – it won’t happen to me.

We see people’s optimism bias play out in many parts of life. One of the classics, though, is smoking. A lot of smokers are going to die from smoking-related illnesses; about 50% of those who smoke regularly. But only 10% to 25% of smokers believe that they’re going to be one of the ones affected. It doesn’t stack up.

In an organisation, the higher up you go, the more invincible you start to feel. And through the progression of your career, you managed to get away with a lot of little things. This is where you can develop hubris. And hubris is the enemy of performance and self-awareness.

A number of years ago, we produced Ep.229: Confidence, Arrogance, and Self-Doubt. It’s critical for a leader to have a high level of confidence – people don’t want to work for someone who’s indecisive and insecure, so the confidence is great.

But if you don’t have some sort of regulation around that, it can easily turn into overconfidence, arrogance, and hubris – it’s critical that you moderate your behaviour and you always keep questioning yourself with those self-doubts that come through.

It’s not imposter syndrome… it’s the handbrake that stops you from falling into hubris.

HOW SHOULD THE BOARD REACT?

Let’s have a look at the contractual obligations that the two executives in question may have been under. We don’t know what either of their employment contracts say, but these days we increasingly see that contractual clauses are being put into CEO’s contracts to regulate their behaviour as well as their performance – it’s not just about increasing total shareholder return.

Occasionally in the past, I’ve dealt with CEOs who fall foul of their boards because of their behaviour –typically, this happens as a result of illicit relationships inside the organisation. It’s not to say that these are married people having affairs, but just the fact that the CEO is having a relationship with one of the lower-level staff is cause for concern.

At the very least, most CEO contracts these days stipulate that they have to declare any relationships to the board so that the board is aware of them and can manage the risk accordingly. At least declare it, right?

This is when we learn about the real board and investor standards. We see these affairs becoming public, and sometimes the board sits back and says, “We’re just going to have a good talking to that CEO because his performance is so good, and we can’t afford to lose him.”

There have also been cases where the board has decided to take more radical action, and terminate the CEO’s employment. It might surprise you to learn that, in some of these cases there’s been investor backlash because the board has sacked a high-performing CEO.

A lot of investors (at the institutional level, at least) aren’t as sold on the value of the organisation’s values and behaviours. What they want is dividend yield. This sends a really strong message to the world about the ethics of that particular business.

On other occasions, there have been financial penalties, where the board decides to withhold some of the long-term incentives or share options that an executive might have earned – this really hits them in the hip pocket , which makes mistakes like these very expensive.

I think the moral of the story is that these days, we’re increasingly seeing in boards all over the world that good performance doesn’t trump bad behaviour.

FRIENDLY, NOT FRIENDS

One of the enduring principles of No Bullsh!t Leadership is to be friendly, but not friends with the people on your team. It’s worth checking out Ep.197: Why Can’t We Be Friends?, where I lay this out in detail.

It’s really important to keep professional distance between you and the people that work for you. And I’m not just talking about romantic relationships here, although of course they’re the extreme example.

If you’re too close to your people, two things are going to happen (because this is the law of reciprocity):

1. They’re going to take advantage of your good nature. They don’t mean to do it; it’s just subconscious because they’re close to you. They know that you’re going to cut them a lot of slack, because they know you really well and you know them really well.
2. You’re going to give them concessions that you wouldn’t give someone else. To the rest of the team, this looks like favouritism. You can understand why that might make them a little bit cynical about the whole deal.

This is why you can’t allow your relationships to become too close. I know it’s really hard when you’re spending a lot of time around someone in close proximity – it accentuates their good points and they’re bad.

If there’s someone you really like and get on with well and are attracted to, I get it, it’s hard. But you’ve got to put that boundary in place, and it’s got to be a firm boundary.

There were a few times during my corporate career when I was single – but I was also in a senior leadership role. I had this little mantra I used to say to myself: “There are over 6 billion people in the world. Why on earth would I want to put my career in jeopardy just because I want to mess around with the dozen or so who work for me directly?“

That was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow when it came to romantic relationships. But there were still times when I had to fight the urge to become very friendly with someone who was reporting directly to me.

The further I went through my career, the more I realised that professional distance is a lifesaver.

A POWER IMBALANCE

Let’s talk about the power dynamics of this relationship. Once again, we have no idea about the Astronomer couple, but one of the underlying principles that sits at the foundation of virtually every sexual harassment case is a power imbalance.

If you have an imbalance in power, it muddies the concept of consent. Let’s face it; it’s all fun and games until someone puts an eye out.

How often have we seen a situation where there’s a workplace relationship that’s going on quite well for a period of time, then the breakup happens and all hell breaks loose? And it’s at times like these that we go and re-examine the concept of consent.

Did the more senior person inappropriately use their power to leverage the relationship? In most cases we never find out the answer to that, but it’s very easy in hindsight to see how that power may have been abused.

If you’re in a situation where you’re in a senior position and you’re dating someone who’s below you in your organisational structure, that’s always going to be a question. And that’s a question that in most cases, you don’t want to have to answer.

Let’s face it; people – particularly men – who have money and power, aren’t always aware of the effect that it has on the people around them. They misread positional deference for physical attraction. And people at lower levels may be starstruck.

This is a recipe for disaster, so when it comes to relationships in the workplace, stay on the straight and narrow. No matter how strong the affiliation or the attraction, you want to make sure that you don’t run that risk. It can ruin careers.

A MATTER OF TRUST

There’s a big difference between people who make mistakes and people who engage in wilful deception over a long period of time. I think it’s easy to forgive a mistake that’s made as a one-off.

But when it comes to long-term, wilful deception, I always sit back and think, “Wow, if they can carry that out so effectively, what else are they lying about? What else are they cheating about? What else are they covering up? What else are they hiding from me?”

Anyone who can build a double life like that, you have to be wary of. Once again, I’m not saying this with any judgment, but how can you believe a word that they say when you see how effectively they can lie and deceive?

When I look at the Astronomer case, the company website emphasises a couple of things. High on the list of the values that they say they ascribe to are integrity and ethical leadership.

But if the CEO and the CPO are engaged in a covert affair, then clearly this is not a value they hold dear, and everyone else in the organisation could be forgiven for thinking, “The company’s values are just window dressing.” If it was really serious about integrity, then you wouldn’t have this sort of stuff going on at the top.

And just remember, the fish rots from the head.

MERITOCRACY

One of the core elements of a high-performing team or organisation is that it is a true meritocracy. There’s no such thing as favouritism in a true meritocracy: those who perform better are going to get further ahead.

Those who get the results also get the rewards. And if they behave well and they have a good, consistent set of values, then they’re going to do really well in the organisation.

If there are any other criteria for separating people and differentiating between them, then there shouldn’t be.

When you get a breach of trust like this, it brings the whole principle of meritocracy into question. Are we playing favorites? Are people being recognised for their performance or because they are in a better position politically or personally?

Even if the separation is reasonably good (because I know a lot of executives who can compartmentalise pretty well), there’s always going to be the question of playing favorites.

In this case, HR is a very challenging portfolio to have question marks over. They have access to privileged information about every employee in the company, so any hint of impropriety is going to really stink.

You should only differentiate on merit because anything else drives deep division in the team. And when it comes to perceptions of favouritism, perception is reality. This cultural impact goes way beyond just one person who decides they’re going to have an affair with another.

IS REDEMPTION POSSIBLE?

Is there a chance of redemption? Are these two people going to be okay, living out their lives and having fruitful careers going forward?

History would tell us that they’re both going to be fine. I’m sure there are going to be some personal impacts, and they are going to have to navigate some pretty choppy waters ahead, no doubt about it. But if their performance is good, they’re likely to be forgiven.

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and now Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are household names. Let’s face it, they’re probably not going to work with each other again directly, but that notoriety is going to give them brand recognition.

A lot of companies will be put off by that, but there are many that won’t. We see people popping up over and over again – CEOs who’ve been sacked or who’ve been under investigation for misconduct –  they turn up in another company soon enough.

Personally, I wouldn’t hire someone who I knew could practice such expert deception. I’d just never know when they were bullsh!tting me. But many boards will… especially when a company needs an experienced CEO in a high-demand industry like AI.

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out, not just for the two individuals involved, but for the whole company. The bottom line for me is: don’t judge these people too harshly… but you probably shouldn’t feel too sorry for them either!