Lunch Invitation from the Boss.

Nicki

Alpha58 wrote: »

To clarify: I work in a large organisation with very firmly defined codes of conduct and I have seen colleagues drummed out for having completely blameless relations with staff of the opposite sex. Everyone's entitled to their opinion but if I were in the position of wanting to pick the brains of/poach/network with a junior female colleague, I would do it in my office, not over lunch. It's not impropriety, it's the appearance of impropriety that does the damage.

Anyone who does not see the dangers is naive in the extreme - we live in an age of finger-pointing and blame culture - but anyway, this is irrelevant as the OP is a man!

Gosh! I've worked in law firms for the whole of my career and not only did we have no such policy, but it was very very common for partners of one sex to take junior lawyers of the opposite sex for lunch one to one on a regular basis. We called it mentoring. Maybe I'm just an ugly old bird but this never resulted in any impropriety towards me .

Cotta

jackomdj wrote: »

How did it go OP?

It was very good and a very nice meal.

Of course there was another angle rather than just a "catch up". Where I'm from originally my company is not well known within and the senior staff member was encouraging me to start branching out in these places and look for leads etc.

Alpha58

arbroath_lass wrote: »

Ummm that was a sarcastic retort to Alpha58's comment (which was claptrap).

Interesting range of responses. What I said was It's not impropriety, it's the appearance of impropriety that does the damage. Share that opinion or not - that's your choice but is there really a need to be so unpleasant?

arbroath_lass

Alpha58 wrote: »

Interesting range of responses. What I said was It's not impropriety, it's the appearance of impropriety that does the damage. Share that opinion or not - that's your choice but is there really a need to be so unpleasant?

Oh come on. That was hardly unpleasant. What you are talking about is discrimination. Plain and simple. THAT is unpleasant.

Any organisation worried about the appearance of impropriety would have banned ALL one to one lunches between junior and senior staff. So I think your post was claptrap.