Spouse Appeal

On budget day it crossed my mind that we should be grateful that the days of the Chancellor of the Exchequer posing on the doorstep of Number 11 Downing Street with his red case in his left hand and his wife (generally looking hugely uncomfortable) in his right are long gone. 

However, it appears that the role of the spouse in garnering support for an individual in politics isn’t over yet.  The recent BBC interview with Justine Thornton, wife of Labour PM hopeful Ed Miliband was electric and not just because it let us into the secret world of the Miliband’s two-kitchen existence.   Thornton was hugely impressive and gave an honest and surprisingly vulnerable view of living with Ed that certainly won me over http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31820175

Compare this to Michelle Obama –on the Ellen Degeneris Show in the US this week throwing some serious dance moves to promote a national fitness campaign and proving herself to be one of the best sports out there: http://www.capitalfm.com/artists/bruno-mars/news/michelle-obama-uptown-funk/ .  She’s human, and smart, and approachable and self-deprecating and funny.  

Our perceptions of The President and of Ed Miliband are augmented significantly through these two interactions. In a world where politicians can become two-dimensional, being given access to their spouses is a masterstroke– assuming of course the spouse in question is up to the job. The irony is that Ed Miliband as described by his wife is more plausible than Ed in front of the cameras. We feel that we can gather more about him as a person from his wife than we can from watching him live at the podium giving a bullet by bullet run-through of the as-yet unpublished Labour party manifesto.

Are there any lessons here for the corporate audience?  Any insight into a UK CEO’s personal life is surprisingly rare at the moment.  

CEOs tend to keep their spouses and their families away from their day jobs.  Richard Branson has come close by insisting that he will take his family into space (presumably whether they want to go or not) for what one must hope will be a return trip on his Virgin Galactic spacecraft.  

It will be interesting to see whether any other consumer brands with high profile CEOs 

choose to follow suit and wheel out the loved ones in support or the brands they are promoting.

Caveat Social Media

Pity Mr Rory Cullinan, a senior Executive at RBS and one of the unfortunate people who, according to the media, is expected to decide where the axe falls in the planned job cuts at that beleaguered organisation.

Mr Cullinan has been vilified in the press last weekend.  His crime was to send a few anodyne selfies privately to his daughter over Snapchat claiming that he was in “boring” meetings. Cullinan’s daughter appears to have decided (presumably on a teenage whim that I suspect she has come to regret) to share his pictures over Instagram – effectively making a private interaction between the two of them public – and a firestorm has resulted.

Even the politicians have dived in with John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw in Nottingham, quoted in the Sun saying: “He should be stripped of all bonuses from his time as head of investment banking. Every single penny.”  Clearly something of an over-reaction, and this whole sorry affair was triggered by what was, presumably, supposed to be an innocent and light-hearted comment from a father to his daughter about the mundane nature of middle aged working life.

Quite apart from whether admitting to being bored in meetings is a crime, (if it is, I suspect it is fairly widespread in most companies) this episode does ring a major alarm bell for those of us who like to use social media in a personal capacity. What Mr Cullinan’s experience shows is that it is not possible to maintain a water-tight barrier between our personal interactions over social media and our working lives. Anything we say on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or even the dating websites may be taken out of context and used to beat us if it suits the media’s agenda to do so.

As Mr Cullinan’s experience demonstrates, something said in jest (and, let’s face it, most things on social media are said in jest) can be taken out of context with dramatic and potentially devastating effect. Remember, Mr Cullinan didn’t say anything bad about his employer or its operations, or his colleagues. And remember that before this weekend, hardly any of us had heard of him.  And yet his selfies have launched him onto the front pages of the newspapers. This tells me that it is probably safest not to comment about working life at all on social networks.  A tough directive for those who spend long hours on the work treadmill, but safest all the same.