Chris Yeh
Published Apr 16, 2016
In a New York Times opinion piece last week to promote his new book, writer Dan Lyons referred to our book, The Alliance, and implied that we argued that “employees are expected to feel complete devotion and loyalty to their companies, even while the boss feels no such obligation in return.” This is a serious mischaracterization of the book we co-authored; in fact, we argue exactly the opposite.
The very title of The Alliance emphasizes that the relationship between a company and an employee should be mutually beneficial, like an alliance between two nations. The book explicitly rejects what we call the “free agent mentality” that has companies treating employees like short-term commodities. As we write in the introduction to the book, “An ideal framework encourages employees to develop their personal networks and act entrepreneurially without becoming mercenary job-hoppers. It allows companies to be dynamic and demanding but discourages them from treating employees like disposable assets.”
Instead, the only line that Dan actually quotes in his op/ed from The Alliance is, “Your company is not your family.” This is self-evident; for example, your dad can't fire you for delivering a poor performance in the school play. Dan only needs to look at his own career for proof that companies don't follow the rules of family; the story arc of his new book kicks off with Newsweek laying him off. However much anyone wants to return to a world of where companies are surrogate families that make (and live up to) promises of lifetime job security, the economic reality is that this nostalgia is highly unlikely to be satisfied.
The Alliance is an attempt to find a better way for companies and employees to relate to each other. Specifically, we suggest companies and employees build trust incrementally and choreograph increasing levels of mutual commitment by defining “Tours of Duty.” A tour of duty, which might last anywhere from six months to six years depending on its mission, ought to spell out what an employee is trying to accomplish, how achieving it benefits the company, and how that achievement accelerates the employee's career. As a tour of duty draws to a close, the manager and employee meet to discuss a follow-up tour. By giving employees a clear sense of career development, we've found that companies that adopt the Alliance Framework improve employee retention and lengthen job tenures. Loyalty builds over time, as both sides make and keep their mutual promises to invest in each other.
In his book, Dan writes, “Hoffman says employees should think of a job as a 'tour of duty' and not expect to stay for too long.” In fact, in The Alliance, we write at length about the perils of short termism. We tell the story of an employee who worked at one company (LinkedIn) for nine years and completed three distinct tours, and conclude: “This seeming contradiction— regularly changing roles in the context of a long-term relationship— is the essence of the tour of duty framework.”
At the heart of our framework is the importance of building high-trust relationships. In The Alliance, we write, “Our goal is to provide a framework for moving from a transactional to a relational approach...By building a mutually beneficial alliance rather than simply exchanging money for time, employer and employee can invest in the relationship and take the risks necessary to pursue bigger payoffs.” Here's how Dan describes our framework: “In [Hoffman's] view, a job is a transaction, one in which an employee provides a service, gets paid, and moves on.” It makes you wonder whether he actually read our book!
Obviously, the relationship between Dan and HubSpot, his former employer, broke down. He didn't like the culture of the company, and he ultimately resigned his position, which is always an option that any employee can choose to take. We don't have any first-hand knowledge of what happened with Dan and Hubspot specifically. It is true that in general there can be times when employees or companies break their alliance; an employee might leave before completing a tour or an employer might fail to fulfill its promises of career development. We discuss all these scenarios in the book, in follow-up articles, and directly with companies adopting the framework.
Overall, companies and employees are going to need better ways to adjust to and thrive on the change sweeping the labor market. The ideas of The Alliance, such as tours of duty and the mutual nature of the employment relationship, can help both parties work together in ways that are flexible and adaptable rather than rigid and inflexible.
This post was co-authored by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh.