Whether it is the mayor of San Francisco admitting a fling with the wife of his campaign manager, or an astronaut love triangle gone wrong, this much is clear: no manager wants to deal with an intimate workplace relationship gone bad.

Nationally syndicated radio talk show Tom Leykis puts it another way—If you want to keep your job, don’t sleep with people you work with. I’ve given employees that advice (although slightly more delicately), but really, by the time you get to the point of telling them that, it’s usually too late.

One time, I was managing the news desk of a major metropolitan newspaper. Two of my assistant news editors got involved, and everyone who worked with them knew it. In fact, they could talk about little else. Complicating the matter was this: both of my assistants were married to other people in the newsroom. One of them was the sports editor, a large, intimidating fellow who could be extremely nasty when mad or drunk.

Not only was the affair distracting to everyone else in my department, but it had the potential of becoming violent if the sports editor ever found out. I had to deal with it, but how?

I enlisted two other editors to help. The plan was to sit down one of two assistants (the male), and give him three reasons to end the affair, listed in this order:

1. If he didn’t end it, his career growth would probably be over.
2. If he didn’t end it, his wife would likely find out and divorce him
3. If he didn’t end it, the large and intimidating sports editor would likely find out and probably kill him.

Guess what? He laughed at reason 1 and shrugged off reason 2. Reason 3, however, got his attention. He ended the affair the next day.