McDonald’s CEO: why can’t firms trust employees to act like grown-ups?

When it comes to McDonald’s firing its CEO Steve Easterbrook over what’s been described as a “consensual relationship” with a subordinate, I get the nagging feeling that the full story is yet to come out. And at some point it probably will.

British-born Easterbrook, who worked his way up through the company like many of the McDonald’s top brass, led a remarkable turnaround having taken charge when the golden arches were at a low ebb,

He oversaw a shake-up of the menus and of the restaurants, improved the quality of ingredients, expanded delivery and mobile payment options. Wall Street liked the taste of what he cooked up and the shares doubled.

A booming stock price often buys an executive a lot of leeway, sometimes more than is healthy. Not, apparently, in this case.

The company stated that Easterbrook had “violated company policy” and demonstrated “poor judgement” with respect to said relationship. The now ex-CEO said he agreed it was time to move on, “given the values of the company”.

McDonald’s employs upwards of 350,000 people, many of them quite young. When you put that many employees in close proximity for however many hours a week (the company has a lot of part-timers on its roster so it varies), the chances are that sparks are going to fly between quite a few of them.

Recognising the inevitability of that, it’d be nice to think that they could be left to handle these things like grown-ups, and for the company to be able to leave well alone so long as staff do their jobs to the required standards, behave with the requisite professionalism and obey the law. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Easterbrook’s relationship was consensual. That’s by no means true of all workplace affairs.

When they involves bosses and subordinates things can go bad very quickly because there’s a power dynamic at work and, well, you can see where this is going.

As such, rules governing those sort of interactions (bans, requirements to report romantic entanglements to HR immediately or else) aren’t uncommon in corporate America.

I would have some concern about their operation in practice. In this case, the senior party has lost a job that paid $15.9m (£12.3m) last year, some 2,124 times the median employee’s salary.

But I’d be surprised if that were always the case. It often seems to be the junior party that suffers the most. Such rules could penalise innocent interactions.

We should also be honest about this: there’d be considerable turnover at the top of corporate Britain if they were more widespread on this side of the pond.

But, well, just put #MeToo into Google. Hell, just look at some of the lawsuits that the City of London has coughed up over the past few years. You can see why they’ve been imposed.

I question whether the motivations for companies going down such a route are entirely pure.

I imagine such stipulations are formulated as much in the interests of protecting corporate reputations and reducing legal bills as they are in fostering safe and inclusive workplaces.

But given what’s emerged, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that companies like McDonald’s, which has had a number of harassment lawsuits filed against it, has sought to draw a line under workplace romances involving managers and their subordinates.

If you’re going to apply them to shop managers, then you also have to apply them to the CEO.

The potential for bosses engaging in conduct far worse than Easterbrook’s “poor judgement” with respect to relationships with their subordinates is always there.