Column by Richard Randall
I wasn’t planning to write about values, but sometimes events cause a course change. The event in this case is the viral “kiss/cam” video of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and chief people officer Kristin Cabot embracing at a Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The pair are caught in an embrace and react quickly when they see they are on the jumbotron, she turning her back and he ducking out of sight. Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin can be heard saying, “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy. I’m not quite sure.”
Naturally social media lit up, with memes and cheating allegations. Byron’s wife, Megan Byron, reportedly removed his name from her Facebook account, reverting to her maiden name, Kerrigan, before deleting the account. She then decamped from their home in Massachusetts to a second home in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Meanwhile, Byron and Cabot have both resigned, and co-founder Pete DeJoy has taken the role of interim CEO. The technology company created a LinkedIn post stating, “Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.”
So what are those values? On Astronomer’s website they are listed on a Careers page under the title Committed to Excellence. “We’re trusted by more than 800 of the world’s leading enterprises. Why? Because our team stays true to our values of keeping customers first, hiring incredible people, and remaining focused on building the industry-leading DataOps platform.” If you’re a job candidate, this is your introduction to the Astronomer culture.
These standards are all about performance, about making customers happy, hiring incredibly high performing people and staying ahead of the competition. If I measure Byron and Cabot against those values, I can’t see that they did anything wrong.
But what’s made this video such a viral fiasco is the common sense that a married CEO should not be found in a public display of affection with his chief people officer. In fact, it’s common sense that a CEO shouldn’t be canoodling with any subordinate regardless of his marital status. That’s not a performance problem; it’s an integrity problem.
In the late 1990’s, when ITT Corporation split into three new companies, the one I was with was called ITT Industries. Our CEO, Travis Engen, immediately began to communicate to everyone that he expected every employee to “Do the right thing always.” That became the integrity value, the standard for behavior. When you do the right thing always you don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your family to know about. You don’t do anything you wouldn’t want in the news or on a jumbotron.
Integrity is a powerful core value for building a great culture. In fact, if I had to build an organization and could choose only one value, it would be integrity. It covers a lot of ground. Build an organization of people with high integrity and you’ll be hard pressed to not have high performance. That’s why Travis Engen started there.
Richard Randall is founder and president of management consulting firm New Level Advisors in Springettsbury Township, York County. Email him at [email protected].
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