Compassionate Management: A Key Part of The Alliance

In our book The Alliance, Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, and I attempt to resolve one of the most difficult questions of modern management: how do you build strong, long-term relationships with employees when you cannot guarantee lifetime employment and when employees do not pledge lifelong loyalty?

Once upon a time, many companies offered employees the promise of lifetime employment. We often think of companies in that era as "families," featuring humane, soft-and-fuzzy management. But it’s not true. Instead, it was the age of the organization man, the interchangeable cog in the gray flannel suit. A company didn’t spend a lot of time asking a “company man” about his values, career aspirations, and personal growth goals. Indeed, when a worker opted to join the company family, he accepted job security at the expense of personal growth and personal expression.

A 20th century job was like a 20th century newspaper – one size fits all. It was the age of both mass media and mass employment.

Today, in our competitive global economy, few companies can afford to promise lifetime employment, and most workers expect to switch employers multiple times in their career. You might think that this more fluid labor market reduces the importance the manager-employee relationship, but it actually represents a great opportunity to build a stronger, more authentic relationship.

Without the crutch of presumed lifelong loyalty, both managers and employees must focus on building a mutually beneficial relationship based on shared aspirations and values. This process of building a mutually beneficial employer-employee relationship is the crux of The Alliance.

It starts with an honest conversation between manager and employee, where both parties commit to completing a significant mission within a realistic timeframe. While there are different kinds of “tours of duty,” the goal is always to create value for both sides: The company accomplishes significant milestones (a new product release; the development of a new supply chain, etc.) and the employee gains experience and expertise that will enhance his career over the long term.

The key to a successful tour of duty is strong alignment between a company’s goals and an employee’s goals. Paradoxically, labor mobility actually increases the opportunity for this kind of alignment. Rather than rely upon a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach, which likely reduces the relationship to the least common denominator, managers can tailor a unique career path that consists of multiple tours of duty for each long-term employee. 

Strong alignment requires a shared understanding of the values, aspirations, and sense of purpose of all the parties involved. In other words: Both sides should care and understand what matters to the company, what matters to the employee, and how those goals can be aligned.

How do you do this? At Allied Talent, our consultancy that helps companies adopt the Alliance Framework and the Start-up of You career development system, we’re working with thousands of managers and individual contributors on the strategies and tactical processes necessary to implement the ideas.

But there’s a broader philosophy that’s useful to understand in order to craft mutually rewarding tours of duty with employees: compassionate management.

Compassion and the Fundamental Truth of Management

Empathy is often defined as feeling what another person is feeling. Compassion, by contrast, is about appreciating a person’s experience and feelings with a more detached mindset that allows you to offer guidance to help them overcome whatever challenges they may be facing.

On a purely human level, compassion of this sort is an ideal we should all strive for. It creates purpose, establishes and reinforces bonds of kinship, and infuses our lives with grace and benevolence.

In the realm of business, I believe a fundamentally compassionate mindset is just as important. As managers, we need to understand every employee’s hopes and dreams, and make sure we’re deeply connecting with our employees on the level of values and a shared sense of mission. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, calls this approach “compassionate management.” Not coincidentally, The Alliance is co-dedicated to him.

What I’ve found in my own career is that the more I try to understand the perspective of others -- the more time I spend asking them questions about their motivations and experiences, and the hopes, fears, and other factors informing their mindsets regarding specific challenges or goals -- the more powerful a manager I become. And as the alignment between my colleagues and I increases through greater compassion and understanding, everyone grows more inspired, more productive, and more devoted to a shared sense of purpose.

The Alliance rests upon a fundamental and oft-neglected truth: The foundation of great management is the way you treat your people. Not just in terms of compensation and job titles -- though these matter -- but by understanding each employee’s feelings and goals in life (compassion) and helping them achieve those goals while advancing the business (The Alliance).

Touching the Hearts of Your Employees

Last week, I keynoted the Blanchard Summit, a gathering of learning and development professionals. At the end of the conference, management legend Ken Blanchard, whose book and movement The One Minute Manager transformed management training, summarized what he had learned. He said the hearing about The Alliance and tours of duty was one of his three big “ah ha!” moments at the conference.

He went on to say that great leaders do not just reach the minds of their team members. Rather, they touch the hearts of the people they lead. He said leadership is about transforming lives, not just businesses. I was genuinely moved by Ken’s remarks. And I understood immediately why he took to the Alliance ideas: We aim to provide practical tools in which employees and managers can relate to each other in a way that embodies his philosophy of leadership.

The companies we work with owe their successes to the strength of the relationships they’ve been able to build with their employees. They recruit, manage, and retain amazing employees by compassionately understanding their people’s aspirations, values, and time horizons--which starts by not treating them as a “head count” expense on a balance sheet but instead as flourishing human beings, each on a unique life journey, each with an opportunity to reach their highest potential -- and each with a manager who can help them do just that.