The Alliance: A Retrospective

In December 2014, HBR published the article "The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age" and a book with the same title later became a NY Times bestseller, as many people were interested in learning how Silicon Valley was dealing with talent acquisition and retention challenges in an ecosystem where many employees were in hot demand and had constant offers for more compensation or higher status. The implication was that they were at the cutting-edge of changes in the employment dynamic and they were experiencing everyone else's future already. It was a compelling and provocative read and got executive leadership's attention everywhere. (An excellent summary is here .)

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha had a previous bestseller, The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself , and Transform Your Career, and The Alliance (with the addition of author Chris Yeh , who later wrote Blitzscaling with Hoffman) was presented as the antidote to the problem employers face with these new careerists: How do you keep them long enough to make a positive impact on your company?

In sum, the antidote was: your best employees will leave your company to advance their careers. Don't fight it: ally with them and agree to a time-specific "tour of duty" with clearly defined goals that mutually benefit their career as well as the employer's business needs, and treat it like a gentleman's agreement.

I founded and led the management consultancy Allied Talent with the authors, based on my vision on how to help organizations understand, accept, and seek to systematically adopt The Alliance framework in organizations. For four years, I led dozens of engagements in Silicon Valley and with an Agile mindset, continuously iterated on and developed the intervention model.

How do you keep them long enough to make a positive impact on your company?

In sum, the antidote was: your best employees will leave your company to advance their careers. Don't fight it...

My early engagements had uncovered a disturbing reality in many companies: the C-suite was often misinformed, or sometimes in denial, about how bad their culture was in middle-management and downstream. I was uncovering difficult truths and despite my best attempt to be objective and persuasive of my impressions, they downplayed or flat-out rejected my diagnoses, prognoses, and recommended courses of treatment.

I knew I was right, however.

So I brought on the thoughtful and wise Dr. Marla Gottschalk , a well-known I/O psychologist, to partner with me to create objective, statistically valid, cultural diagnostic survey tools that would incontrovertibly present the facts of the matter that my gut told me were true but weren't being accepted at the C-level.

My early engagements had uncovered a disturbing reality in many companies: the C-suite was often misinformed, or sometimes in denial, about how bad their culture was in middle-management and downstream.

We weren't merely telling CEOs what was wrong with their culture and why bad things were happening and more were to come. We were identifying what works, and what they can do to turn things around with a high level of certainty—a SWOT analysis, in essence.

The most common problems were:

• inadequate and poor communication from the C-suite that made employees unsure and anxious
• unacknowledged damage to employee trust from past actions that weren't well explained and that weren't allowed the emotional space to process the events
• people managers were untrained and incapable of having necessary conversations
• a perceived lack of time to have those conversations
• a sense of futility in those conversations, anyway, since managers felt powerless to make necessary agreements and arrangements to effect a mutually-rewarding relationship with a career-ambitious employee
• embedded compensation rules, performance management systems and KPIs that were beneficial only to the company and utterly disregarded the goals and values of the employee, which undermined the hope of a mutually-rewarding relationship
• a lack of psychological safety among employees that prevented them from doing their best work and flourishing in the organization, disengaged them, and filled them with an ominous feeling they would be pushed out of the company or have to leave.

Despite a high level of interest in the theory and ideals presented in the book, time and again the response from the C-suite was: "Thanks but no thanks. Things aren't that bad here!"

It was depressing us to know that they were that bad, and that there was a solution, but few leaders cared to accept the reality and commit to doing something about it. In time, we watched many (but not all) of these companies have bad things happen to them, including hits to their stock, mass layoffs, and going out of business entirely. It was no surprise to us: the writing was on the wall. (Some companies we worked with were successful, and though I believe we helped them, they needed us less.)

In the end, did we make a difference? We did, but not at the organizational level.

We helped struggling managers become leaders: I know that as a fact. We re-engaged employees, and strengthened relationships. We helped people redefine their roles and get more out of their work, and manage up and drive conversations their managers were failing to initiate. No doubt some people realized it was time to move on: their company and manager weren't being allies.

In the end, did we make a difference? We did, but not at the organizational level.

We also learned that most people in an organization are not the super-career-ambitious stars highlighted in The Alliance. A majority of corporate employees don't expect or want to climb the corporate ladder and amass more power and responsibility. They want to finding meaning and pride in the work they're doing presently, more or less. Asking them "how do you see your career transforming in the next two-or-three years?" makes them uncomfortable or worse: scared they'll be forced out if they aren't moving up the ranks.

Organizations need stability—lots of it—and those employees are the source. Treat them with respect and acknowledge that they are different from the more career-ambitious ones, and that's good. You need them.

One thing I learned was that the rest of the world wasn't like many of the clients we worked with in Silicon Valley, and they aren't going to be.

One of the premier food and beverage multinationals didn't have a problem with turnover like tech companies were facing: their compensation model with lucrative stock-options and retirement plans kept employees for life, and that wasn't going to change. A large, east-coast privately held software company kept employees because of their work-life balance and perks that made it unpalatable to leave. One of the most successful restaurant businesses seemed like just a nice place to work and people stayed for decades. These companies have different challenges than Silicon Valley: they struggled with preventing their core strength of stability becoming complacency, with the strategy being to make sure they have enough go-getters in the right roles.

One thing I learned was that the rest of the world wasn't like many of the clients we worked with in Silicon Valley, and they aren't going to be.

The Alliance addressed the virtue of transformation but neglects stability. Which is understandable given its origin. Organizations and people, though, need both always. It's tricky to get the balance right, because transformation and stability are antagonistic forces. And they're dynamic: when you focus on transformation, the instability will create stress, and you need to know when to lay off the gas and restore stability. There are times for transformation and times for stability for organizations and for people. Leaders need to be mindful of this always.

Based on my thousands-of-hour journey, and being the world's most experienced expert on the matter (humbly but truly), here is my answer to the question I have been asked hundreds of times: Does every employee need a Tour of Duty?

I would answer: ideally, yes, but the form will vary a lot, and not all the time.

The Alliance addressed the virtue of transformation but neglects stability. Which is understandable given its origin. Organizations and people, though, need both always.

When there is need for transformation is when a Tour of Duty matters most. When there is a need for stability, it matters least, if at all.

What matters most is: are the right conversations happening between the manager and employee? Do they understand each other? Do they share the joint responsibility of achieving goals that are aligned as much as possible with the needs of the company and of the person's own goals and values? Are they checking in regularly to see if things have changed and there needs to be a recalibration? It would be a good idea to put in writing the summary of these conversations to make sure they're remembered and honored.

The truth is most managers, and most employees, simple don't have the skills-training to have those conversations. For most people, it needs to be taught.

When there is need for transformation is when a Tour of Duty matters most. When there is a need for stability, it matters least, if at all.

Yes, some people are amazing natural people managers and whether they know it or not, they have been advocates of the spirit conveyed in The Alliance already. You're blessed if you ever have such a manager. I suspect Reid Hoffman is one such gifted person.

The other truth is that most executive leaders in organizations, even if they're inspired by the message in The Alliance, don't value the ideal enough to make the commitment and do the heavy lifting necessary to implement those values and necessary practices.

So it is up to the individuals, in the end, to form mutually beneficial relationships and do their best to be allies, in spite of organizational culture and systems that impede it. Almost anyone can up their game tremendously as a people manager if that's part of their career path. And as elusive as it has been so far, I am certain that organizations could outperform their stretch goals if ever they'd boldly embrace the values and practices The Alliance presented in overview and our years of work expanded up, systematized, and operationalized.

It has taken several years for me to process and come to terms with what was ultimately a personal disappointment, because we didn't change the way things were done in corporations everywhere like we should have, even though we were right.

I hope that we planted the seeds for change in pockets here and there, and maybe—just maybe—someone we did help will become a CEO who will really make it happen at the organizational level, and show the world we were truly onto something great.