I am adding "anti-fraternization" policy to my employee handbook today.
Seriously, does anybody know how to handle the hr on discovering a supervisor / direct report are dating?
I've been told that best practices is to immediately suggest one or the other resign, and if they don't, fire both for violating policy.
How does one handle this situation?
You can make all the policies you want but human nature does not care much for policies.
The best cure is an immediate transfer to another department of either of the two. That way you avoid all the claims of favoritism and possible fall-out in case the relationship goes sour. Also make sure that managers know that such relationships should immediately be reported to upper management. (Hard if the 'upper management' is in fact one of the parties). Any evidence of pressure from the higher-up should result in immediate termination. Again, that's pretty tough but it is much better than the possible alternatives.
That said, in all three of those cases they were dating an indirect report. That's still a bit of a no-no, but nowhere near as problematic as dating a direct report. Your manager has a huge influence on your career; the company CEO dating someone who works for the company is a little dodgy and will cause morale problems elsewhere, but it's much harder to argue direct influence when they don't directly interact in the course of the workday.
In this situation the real problem is a you have sexist fuckwad of a partner who is basically a loose cannon and going to get you in trouble eventually. If you really want to build a company with someone like that you need to start telling them to tone it down early and often, but of course that's easier said than done.
That's not even remotely true. No court has ever held that merely dating a subordinate is ipso facto sexual harassment. Accordingly, many companies do not have an official policy against it.
I have the opposite opinion in that I think that sexual harassment cases involving exes in the work place should almost always be thrown out, but alas...
It's nearly impossibly to date someone and not sexually harass them in some way. It's doubly hard to break up with someone and not sexually harass them in some way.
Considering most of her allegations are words/phrases that he called her, and considering many people call significant others very bad things when they are breaking up, it's almost impossible to draw the line between sexual harassment and break-up banter.
Also, NSFW Instagram images.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-02/tinders-forg...
"Tinder's Forgotten Woman: Whitney Wolfe, Sexism, and Startup Creation Myths"
Also, great article, I thought.
While the dude's clearly a jerk, his first startup sounds like it died a death that was out of his hands, not a result of his being a predator.
As an aside, Mateen exhibits the textbook Madonna-whore dichotomy. To him, women are either someone he can see being a wife (Wolfe pre-breakup), or a whore/bimbo/slut (the women on his Instagram feed). When she rejected him, in classic fashion she went from the former bucket to the latter. This is a case study for a gender-studies paper.
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tinderslut
Isn't the point of the app to enable promiscuity. "Slut" is a word for a promiscuous woman, sometimes used for a prostitute, sometimes used of men (in UK at least). Surely they viewed the women who use the app as wanting to have free and easy sexual encounters, ie behave like sluts?
When the slang that associated their app with the actions of those using it, viz "tinderslut", was popularised were they not justified to consider that an achievement - the app was clearly notorious for enabling promiscuous behaviour, exactly the behaviour it was designed for.
There seems little controversial in them calling active users of their app sluts (men or women).
For me there is much to hate about the app morally but it seems rather silly to get upset that the designers of the app that people use to seek out promiscuous sex consider their users to be in to promiscuous sex?!
Calling Tinder user "sluts" is no more appropriate than calling my Chinese users "chinks", or my gay users "faggots".
It seems intentionally obtuse to pretend that the term doesn't have a gigantic truckload of derogatory connotations behind it.
I think it is sometimes, maybe, possible to use this kind of term in a way that communicates a positive "no apologies" attitude. However, I think a speaker has to go to some lengths if this use is going to be convincing. Especially, it's a lot easier for people denigrated by a term to convincingly use it in a way that show non-derogatory attitude - contrast a ghetto black person using the N word versus a middle class Southern white person using the same word.
And there is a double standard in the US, where only a promiscuous woman gets called a slut. Someone might turn that around but that person would to do a lot of work to show they were sincere.
Edit: As usual, anything not supporting the usual response gains downvotes.
You are still free to say whatever you want, and people are free to call you an asshole and distance themselves from you.
Not cool for companies to lie about their history, even if a lot of them do it.
From talking to IAC people, they don't care what the founder say -- to a point -- as long as people are using the app. As this article made clear however, if you get too far off the messaging and start to oversell the "independent" angle, you will be smacked back into reality.
And then thing is, it isn't cool for a lot of companies to lie about their history -- but if you don't create this false narrative (and let's be clear, 90% of the startup narratives you hear are altered to make the story more attractive. The same is true for any other aspect of business (see also: Hollywood)), people won't pay attention. To a certain extent, as a society, we wall want to have that great Cindarella story.
We want to believe Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team (even though that's not really what happened [1]) and then went on to be one of the greatest players of all time, because it helps create hope within ourselves that we too can overcome the odds and be that successful.
A successful startup born out of an incubator that is funded by a multi-billion dollar company with direct reports to the incumbent in an industry it is trying to "disrupt" is far less compelling for everyone than "we had this idea for this app and it spread like wildfire and now the VCs are coming knocking at our door."
That said, as icky and gross as I find every single person in this entire Tinder saga (to be clear, I think Wolfe was absolutely a victim but that doesn't mean I'd want to hang out with her), the truly notable aspect of the company (to me at least), which was its astonishing growth, was legit. That didn't happen because of IAC or Match (at least, not directly, meaning b/c of those employees or that branding). And that's still laudable. The service might be run by total jerks, but it's growth rate is still laudable and is still an interesting narrative into itself, even if we accept that the whole rags to riches, came out of nowhere aspect, is bullshit (which it is).
[1]: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/2012/01/16/106149626/...
It's likely that current events help explain some oddities in Tinder's past.
Tinder isn't a real startup, but a manufactured success for a couple of well-connected douchebags (who behave as if they're above the law). It's the Disneypreneur phenomenon (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/silicon-valle...). If you look into it, both of these guys are invaders from the MBA culture.
These phony startups, that are actually pre-arranged by powerful players in the mainstream corporate/McKinsey world, are becoming a lot more common and they're often difficult for genuine, old-style startups to compete with. (They blow up big, suck up a lot of talent and attention, then fail and lose credibility, so their inferior capability still leads to a both-lose outcome.)
This is going to blow up big in a couple of years: this massive proliferation of propped-up junk businesses and pseudo-startups run by incompetents. We're already seeing the embarrassing-but-not-yet-devastating fuckups. We haven't seen an Enron yet. But that's going to come, and it's going to have massive effects (and probably negative ones, on good and bad players) on the startup scene.
Evan Spiegel should have been fired after the frat emails surfaced. As for Clinkle, that's been around for years and hasn't produced jack shit because it's not even a real company-- just a scam.
...and now I have no reason to believe either her allegations or his defenses. People are simply unreliable witnesses in matters concerning former romantic partners that they are not on good terms with.
EDIT: Referencing top comments.
Their actions aren't right, but they are not surprising based on age and level of success.
It's unfortunate that it takes a case like this for people to question if slutshaming is accetable behavior.
It's very brave of her to file the lawsuit. Whatever shitparade the other founders and dealing with, I'm sure hers is ten times worse.
If Rad had just forced his friend Mateen to resign earlier on for "creative differences" before his behavior got out of hand, everyone -- including Mateen! -- would have been strictly better off.
And this definitely isn't the first time that this has happened (Rap Genius, and I'm sure there are others too...)
TL;DR: Do your sexist, racist friends a favor by getting them out of your workplace.
(By the way, to be clear, I don't feel bad for any of these guys. They deserved what happened. But this sort of thing really shouldn't be happening again, and again, and again...)
You could replace "Tinder" with any company and find that the above statement holds true. Twitter isn't Jack or Ev or Biz, it's the combination of the three. Facebook was mostly Zuck, but not all. Apple was indeed [very] heavily influenced by Steve Jobs, but Apple wasn't Steve Jobs.
I've found the idea of a single genius founder being behind anything is largely a myth; they're just the public face of a company that is doing great things in the background.
Founder or nothing these days, eh?
I wish I could believe this isn't the actual reason that Mateen is gone.
