BLUF: My Admin is dating one of my Direct Reports. I am now worried about confidentiality. How do I proceed?
I am a director at a company of 150 people. My Admin works as an executive admin for me, as well as assisting my 8 Direct Reports. I recently found out that Admin has been dating my Direct (a manager) for about 3 or 4 months. She is recently divorced (about 2 months ago) and he is separated. At this point, I have not talked to either of them about this.
Our policy manual does not prohibit this behavior and says that it must be disclosed.
My concern is- confidentiality and breach of trust. Admin has access to my emails, files, performance reviews, etc.
I am thinking that the Manager will be disciplined for not disclosing relationship. Most likely, just a written documentation-type thing.
The difficult part will be the Admin. I think I will need to take some of her responsibilities away (handling emails, typing performance reviews, some of the financial reporting, etc.)
Am I over-reacting? What would you do?
Any advice appreciated!
I say leave it and see what
I say leave it and see what happens.
I believe in trusting people until they give me reason not to and it doesn’t sound like anything has happened yet.
Relationships can cause confidentiality problems, but then again, so can friendships. With the information that she has about your emails, files, performance reviews etc. she could go tell the manager she is seeing, but she could also tell the other managers if she wants to, or anybody, in fact.
There must be trust there for her to do the job. That must have been one of the reasons why she was hired.
If you restrict her work and discipline the manager, you may as well go the whole hog and get rid of her completely, as you will not be able to use her as an admin and she will be demotivated.