The chief executive of a Michigan bank has lost her job after facing backlash for a social media photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America,” referencing Donald Trump’s relabeling of Lake Ontario.
Jane Smith from Family First Credit Union recently went viral after sharing the photo of her and three relatives wearing navy blue crewnecks with the words “Lake America” scrawled in white. The picture was snapped as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but Smith says the sweatshirts were edited onto their bodies using AI.
“We weren’t trying to make a political statement,” Smith told Michigan outlet WJRT. “However, we were kind of poking fun at the fact that one of the Great Lakes’ names were getting changed.”
Family First Credit Union announced Wednesday that Smith was no longer with the company and that Jason Acosta, the chief operations officer, would serve as interim CEO.
Yeah, I follow ya. Different approaches, but aiming for the same goal.
As for this women. I have worked for some smaller companies, and some large. It seems to me that the role of the CEO is often more a marketing role. They use their connections to get deals done and such. Though a bank may be different. They aren’t selling per se to businesses, but I would guess the role of CEO there is also part of getting bigger clients to keep their money at the bank. So I can see how even off the clock comments can vastly undermine their job performance. Where as for most of us it wouldn’t. But I can also imagine there are probably companies out there with CEOs for which they aren’t really just interacting with customers, but actually spending the majority of their time managing the company. So yeah, maybe a blanket exception doesn’t fit.