I think I’m supposed to feel sorry for Kristin Cabot, the HR executive from Astronomer, caught on camera at a Coldplay concert, canoodling with her boss, former CEO Andy Byron.
The New York Times gave a breathless account of Cabot’s life after Coldplay that read as if it were written by someone desperately eager to be friends with her. (The reporter traveled to Cabot’s New Hampshire home, doesn’t question Cabot’s assertion that her first thoughts were “Oh my God, I hurt people. I hurt good people,” and describes her in the most sympathetic ways possible.)
It’s clearly designed to make people feel sorry for Cabot. (Props to Cabot’s “communications consultant.”)
But, while I’m an empathetic person in general, as an HR professional, I’m still just horrified by her behavior. And I cannot support the general framing of this is something bad that just “happened” to Cabot. You shouldn’t either. You should expect better of your HR professionals and your CEOs. (Byron is just as culpable, but the New York Times didn’t write about him in warm, fuzzy terms.)
Certainly, she did not deserve death threats. No one deserves death threats. (I received them, bizarrely, for an article about Megyn Kelly’s choice in clothing.) Cabot’s attackers were much more vicious and persistent than mine were. Was her sin of going on a date with her boss worth losing her whole career? Many, many people have done the same with no ill professional consequences. It was a risk with a low probability of ruining her life.
So while I feel badly that she experienced the extreme end of horrible consequences, I’m also reminded of a song I learned in childhood that went like this: “When you choose the very first step on the road, you also choose the last, so if you don’t like the end of the road, you better back up, you know you better back up fast.”
Cabot was not a naive 22-year-old intern; she was a seasoned, experienced human resources professional. She knew pursuing her boss romantically (she admits she invited him on a date) was a road that could have an unpleasant consequence at the end. She added alcohol to the mix, and even without the Coldplay cameras, things could have gone poorly. The message is “it could happen to anyone.”
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Suzanne Lucas
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