There is an old adage that says, “You should never get your honey where you get your money.” Your work is not Match.com. Keep your love life outside the building.

This is especially true if the person you’re interested in is your subordinate. To this I say one thing: “No! Don’t do it! You’re playing with dynamite!”

The relationship can create a hostile work environment, kill innovation and productivity, cause other co-workers to feel uncomfortable, and even lead to claims of favoritism. As Beth P. Zoller, legal editor at XpertHR, told Monster.com, “Junior-senior relationships in the office can hurt morale and even harm the company if the people involved forget their professionalism. Additionally, if the relationship ends, one of the employees may claim the relationship was not consensual, that the employee was sexually harassed, or that that employee was retaliated against if that employee receives a poor performance review from the former paramour.”

Hanky-panky can get you fired.

On October 21, 2009, ESPN baseball announcer Steve Phillips revealed that he had been involved in a consensual affair with a twenty-two-year-old ESPN production assistant named Brooke Hundley. After an initial suspension by ESPN, four days later the company gave Phillips the boot.

To make the story uglier, Hundley then sued ESPN, claiming the network defamed her by firing her based on false statements by Phillips and by claiming she had not fully cooperated with its investigation. She accused ESPN of acting maliciously to insulate itself from liability for Phillips’ conduct, and said she lost her job and subsequent job opportunities, suffered damage to her reputation, and had been harassed by the public as a result of the publicity.

The nastiness just kept on going!

Innovation Leaders Know…

As an innovation leader, you’ll see your employees not as sexual targets but as individual human beings. You’ll be able to compartmentalize how you see and interact with other people. If you’re an executive and you go to a bar after work, you’re entitled to flirt with the sexy office worker you meet there, and even enter into an intimate relationship. But if the sexy office worker is your employee, then the “let’s get friendly” switch in your brain must be flipped to the “off” position. Don’t complain or whine about it—just do it!

Innovation leaders know that relationships in the workplace virtually always end in disaster. Correspondingly, they simply make a commitment not to participate in any office romances whatsoever. This is simply a choice that the best innovation leaders always make.