“The Cuddle Puddle”: When Power Gets Personal, Business Pays the Price

Let’s skip the euphemisms and get to the heart of it:

We’re not going to build the future if every executive team functions like a private harem.

The latest installment? A CEO and his head of HR caught mid-Coldplay cuddle while their company’s credibility quietly bleeds out in the background.

Embarrassing? Yes.

But more than that: It’s insulting.

To the women who show up to work, not flirt.

To the men who respect boundaries.

And to anyone still operating under the quaint assumption that leadership is about vision, ethics, and merit, not mattress access and proximity politics.

There’s something uniquely corrosive about what I call the Executive Team Cuddle Puddle: that soft, whispery inner ring of influence, where promotions are winked into being, power is traded for innuendo, and access requires either lingerie or plausible deniability.

It’s the unspoken performance review no one prepares you for:

Are you loyal, or expendable? Pliant, or a problem?

And if you’re a woman who refuses to barter your boundaries for career breadcrumbs, the cuddle puddle isn’t just cringe. It’s a career-ending force field.

How It Works

You arrive smart, focused, competent. Maybe even the best at what you do.

But you’re not invited to drinks. Not to the offsite. Not to the private Slack channel where actual decisions are made. Why? Because you don’t play the game. You don’t flirt. You don’t pretend not to hear the comments. You don’t giggle at the CEO’s jokes, or fawn, or feign. You’re not there to pander, you’re there to ponder. To add perspective shaped by actual substance and a rare, hard-won grasp of how life really works.

You don’t need to be chosen.

So they don’t choose you. And if you push back? You’re suddenly:

“Difficult.”

“Not a culture fit.”

Or, the classic: “Just an assistant.”

Meanwhile, a junior hire with “great energy” and recently enhanced assets floats into strategy sessions because, in this ecosystem, value is measured in cup size and how convincingly you can fake-laugh through a board dinner without choking on the shrimp cocktail.

This Isn’t Just a Moral Failing. It’s a Business One.

How many brilliant, high-integrity women have been sidelined for refusing to join the cosplay version of corporate intimacy?

How many HR leaders have blurred every ethical line in the handbook to protect their VIP pass to the cuddle puddle?

And how many companies claim to be about innovation and impact, while running like a frat house in WeWork drag?

If the price of leadership is capitulation, then leadership is a lie.

And the women trading dignity for access aren’t winning.

They’re upholding the very system that will eventually discard them too.

Let’s Call It What It Is

It’s not romance. It’s a business transaction dressed up as a fling.

It’s not chemistry. It’s coercion in a Patagonia vest.

It’s not networking. It’s grooming.

And every time a man in power trades leadership for libido, he corrupts the system, not just for the women he excludes, but for the men he teaches to normalize it.

The future won’t be built in cuddle puddles.

It will be built by those who know the difference between optics and substance.

By those who trade posturing for principle.

Who do the work, quietly and consistently.

Who don’t need the spotlight, because they’re building the infrastructure that makes it shine.

Real leadership doesn’t dominate the room.

It builds it, brick by brick, with discernment and discipline.

There is a better way.

And the ones walking it?

They don’t need to announce it.

They’ll simply keep proving it.