The Account

The Scenario Is Just the Vehicle

A field worker is harassed by the company’s largest customer and reports it — and leadership has to decide what to do about the account.

What This Lab Is Really About

Whether your company’s stated commitment to protecting its people survives a direct threat to its biggest revenue source — and who actually has the authority to make that call and absorb the cost.

The real discussion is not about one customer or one incident. It is about whether your values hold when the harasser signs the checks — and whether your own incentives quietly decide otherwise, through delay, “let’s not overreact,” and a quiet reshuffle no one ever calls a choice.

This Is Not a Question of Whether to Act

The Lab assumes you act. It never debates whether to protect the worker.

If the room is allowed to argue “should we do something,” it becomes a morality play, everyone nods, and no one is tested. The pressure lives one level down: how, by when, who has the authority to fire a customer, whose number takes the hit, what you tell the field staff who are watching — and whether the company’s machinery produces “sacrifice her quietly” without anyone ever deciding it.

Inject 1 · The Report

The facts land: what happened, that the technician reported it, and that the harasser is a senior contact at Clements — Wydmer’s largest account. The room sizes up the situation, and the revenue at stake surfaces almost immediately.

Inject 2 · The Pressure

The squeeze arrives: Clements leans on the relationship, the quarter’s numbers come into view, and someone floats the comfortable middle path — “let’s investigate first,” “let’s quietly rotate her off the Clements account, no drama.” This is the trap closing. The room is meant to start drifting toward delay before the next card lands.

Inject 3 · The Filing (the detonator)

The technician has retained counsel, and it’s headed for a public filing that names both companies — Wydmer, for failing to protect a worker from known third-party harassment, and Clements, for its executive’s conduct and its own failure to act.

Everything inverts. The “valuable account” the room was protecting is now a co-defendant and a reputational liability — the thing they were trying to preserve is the thing about to hurt them. The General Counsel moves to the center; the CFO has a very different number to weigh. And the “reasonable steps” beat: what protects Wydmer now is evidence it acted promptly once it knew — which makes the room’s own hesitation, ten minutes ago, Exhibit A.

“We’d never trade an employee’s safety for revenue.”

No one in the room would ever say that out loud — and that’s exactly why this Lab works. The question isn’t whether anyone decides to trade her safety for the account. It’s whether the company’s incentives — the quarter, the relationship, the instinct to not overreact — quietly make that trade for them, one reasonable-sounding delay at a time. Good people, good intentions, structural outcome.

Chief Revenue / Sales Leader — owns the Clements relationship and feels the loss most directly. Not the villain — this is their job.

Chief Operations Officer — owns the field workforce, the Clements staffing, and any “just send someone else” option (and who that exposes).

Head of HR / CHRO — owns the technician, the duty of care, and the morale of every field employee watching how this goes.

General Counsel — employer liability for known third-party harassment, and the exposure that grows the longer the room hesitates.

CFO — what Clements is worth, what losing it does to the numbers and the jobs tied to it — and, after Inject 3, what the litigation and brand damage are worth.

CEO — makes the call and owns what it signals to the whole company about whose safety is negotiable.

Who actually has the authority to fire a customer — and has that ever been decided, or do we decide it incident by incident, under pressure?

Do we have a position on customer and third-party harassment before it happens — or only a scramble after?

What do our field workers believe will happen if they report a customer? (Often: that they’ll be the one moved or blamed — which is its own retaliation risk.)

What is a worker’s safety worth in dollars — and have we ever actually decided that, or does the size of the account decide it for us?

0–10 min — Frame. Set the rule of the room: we are not deciding whether to protect her. We are deciding what we do and what it costs.

10–30 min — Inject 1. The report and the account at stake. First options on the table.

30–50 min — Inject 2. The pressure. Let the room work the options and start drifting toward the comfortable delay.

50–70 min — Inject 3. The filing against both companies. The reckoning — and the “reasonable steps” look back at the room’s own hesitation.

70–90 min — Reframe & commit. The surfacing questions, then the decisions the room will actually carry out of the room.

Facilitator’s guide — full run-of-show, timing, the rule of the room, and how to hold the line against the morality-play drift.

The three inject cards — sequenced for timed reveal, with Inject 3 (the both-companies filing) as the detonator.

Role briefs — one per seat (Revenue, COO, CHRO, GC, CFO, CEO), each with the pressure that seat carries.

Reframe & surfacing-question set — the “we’d never trade safety for revenue” turn and the four questions to leave open.

Legal-context primer — a plain-language, counsel-hedged page on employer duty for third-party harassment and both-company exposure.

Commitments template — who holds the authority to fire a customer, the written position, and the reporting-and-protection path field workers can trust.

Debrief one-pager — the takeaways and the homework, sized for a follow-up email to the room.

Pairs with the front-line scenario. This Lab is the executive top of a vertical that starts on the ground in “The Customer Crossed a Line” — the worker’s recognition in the moment, then the boardroom’s cost-of-protecting-her dilemma here.