The Alliance Quotes

“the fundamental paradox of the tour of duty: acknowledging that the employee might leave is actually the best way to build trust, and thus develop the kind of relationship that convinces great people to stay.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Too many employees are made to feel guilty or conflicted when they attend conferences or networking happy hours. You need to make it clear that the company isn’t supporting networks as an employee benefit, but rather as a mutually beneficial asset that helps the company as well.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Nor should this practice be limited to formal events that require official support. Simply allowing employees to host clubs and associations is a low-cost way to encourage external networking. We do recommend that any employee who hosts a meeting in the company offices make it open to any other employee who wants to attend (which hopefully helps develop even more new relationships).”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Give your people time to take on leadership roles and speaking gigs in associations. Employees who are thought leaders outside the company improve the company brand and the employee’s own personal brand.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“You should want your employees to be discoverable by the outside world in a professional context. They’re discoverable anyway, thanks to Google and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you should incentivize them to craft their presence in a way that’s maximally helpful to the company.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Knowledge isn’t valuable unless shared.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Make the network intelligence flowing into the company via its employees a first-class management concern.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Yet as we know, PayPal triumphed over Billpoint, leading eBay to purchase PayPal for over $1.5 billion. One of the key factors was PayPal’s superior use of network intelligence. Reid led this intelligence-gathering effort for PayPal (he was executive vice president at the time) and asked all the members of the team, from executives to individual engineers, to use their network intelligence to learn about Billpoint’s strategy. Billpoint’s team, on the other hand, completely ignored the potential for network intelligence to provide insights into PayPal’s strategy.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“So don’t treat tweeting on the job like an infraction—encourage it! Ask your employees to expense lunches with interesting people. By helping employees invest in their individual networks, you build an environment of trust and reciprocity. And when you ask employees to tap their own networks on behalf of the company, they’ll be more likely to respond favorably.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Think of each employee as an individual scout picking up data from the outside world—from articles, books, and classes, but most important, from other friends inside and outside the industry. Each employee can receive and decipher intelligence from the outside world that helps the company adapt. For example, what’s a competitor doing? What are key tech trends? It’s the manager’s job to recognize and encourage the power of each of these scouts. A more networked workforce generates more valuable intelligence, and when your employees share what they learn from their networks back into your company, they help solve its key business challenges”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“There are more smart people outside your company than inside it. In a healthy ecosystem, this is always true.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“the alliance at work: growing their professional networks helps employees transform their career; employee networking helps the company transform itself.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“BE AS CONCRETE AND SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE. The point of the framework is to avoid vagueness around goals and timelines and to get specific.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Give the employee time to prepare his own ideas and proposals.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“SHARE THE AGENDA IN ADVANCE.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“At the end of the conversation, agree on next steps and schedule a follow-up. The final deliverable should be a written Statement of Alliance.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“REGULARLY CHECK IN ON HOW THE TOUR IS EVOLVING. This is not a onetime conversation. Remember that trust is built by consistency over time.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“ESTABLISH A BASIS FOR TRUST THROUGH OPENNESS AND TRANSPARENCY. It’s important to frame the conversation with the kind of vocabulary that conveys the open, bidirectional nature of the relationship. Use words like trust, transparency, and alliance. Another key way to demonstrate openness is to be willing to discuss scenarios in which the employee might leave the company. This kind of transparency helps build trust and reduces the risk of being blindsided by a departure.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“If you carefully manage leading indicators such as mission alignment, an employee’s ability to gather network intelligence, or general satisfaction during tours of duty check-ins, you’ll successfully manage lagging indicators such as employee retention or engagement.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“It’s trickier to transition current employees from a free agency mind-set to tours of duty. Introducing a new and different approach will require multiple conversations and a steady consistency.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“But even when performance deteriorates, it’s still important to remember that the alliance is a relationship, not a transaction. Ups and downs are inevitable, and both sides should maintain a long-term investment perspective rather than responding in knee-jerk fashion to short-term turbulence. A baseball team would never cut a player simply because he had a bad game. But if the player experienced a month-long slump, the team might very well trade or release him.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Managers shouldn’t use the moral imperative of a tour of duty to force an employee to stay in an onerous position, especially if the poor fit is the result of flawed management decisions. The goal of the tour of duty is to build trust with honest communication and to create longevity on a voluntary basis, not to lock employees into roles they dislike or lock up companies with ineffective employees.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“You should set up a system of regular checkpoints to assess how the tour of duty is going for both parties (see figure 4-1). These checkpoints could be held at regular intervals (e.g., quarterly) or could be tied to specific milestones in the overall project plan associated with the tour of duty. Either way, the goal is to provide an explicit forum for jointly evaluating progress toward both parties’ desired results. This enables course corrections as necessary. Remember, it’s a bidirectional conversation: the company talks about the employee’s contributions and the employee talks about whether the company is helping him meet his career goals.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“A successful tour of duty should move the needle for the employee as well as the company. Success might include developing new knowledge and skills; acquiring functional, technical, or managerial experience to advance the employee’s career; and building a personal brand within and outside the company by accomplishing an impressive goal. Usually it won’t include an upgrade in job title.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Implementing a tour of duty with strong alignment means leaving behind the rote exchanges of template-driven performance reviews where little of import is said or done. Instead, you need to have frank, open, rigorous conversations. Both manager and employee have an explicit (albeit nonbinding) agreement with shared objectives and realistic expectations. This agreement provides the criteria for regular, mutual performance measurement and management. You provide specific feedback and guidance to the employee; just as important, the employee has a context in which to talk about his long-term career goals and whether the company is accommodating them as promised.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“BUILD TRUST BY OPENING UP. Learning what an employee cares about helps build a relationship of trust. Psychologist Arthur Aron of SUNY Stony Brook discovered that asking participants in an experiment to share their deepest feelings and beliefs for a single hour could generate the same sense of trust and intimacy that typically takes weeks, months, or years to form.6 Direct questions like “Who’s the best coworker you ever worked with?” and “What is your proudest career moment?” help break down emotional distance.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“Remember, the employee and the company don’t have to be aligned forever, just for the length of the tour of duty. Ultimately, the alignment of interests, values, and aspirations increases the odds of a long-term, strong alliance between a company and its talent.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“WORK TOGETHER TO ALIGN EMPLOYEE, MANAGER, AND COMPANY. Once everyone’s values and aspirations have been articulated, all parties should work together to strengthen the alignment between them. This is a collaborative rather than top-down effort. It’s not just a job for you, but for the employee as well. The good news is, working together on this can actually help build the long-term relationship.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age