THE ALLIANCE
"Introducing the new, realistic loyalty pact between employer and employee The employer-employee relationship is broken, and managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: the old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent. The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or free agents. Think of them instead as allies. As a manager you want your employees to help transform the company for the future. And your employees want the firm to help transform their careers for the long term. But this win-win scenario will only happen if both sides trust each other enough to commit to mutual investment and mutual benefit. Sadly, trust in the business world is hovering at an all-time low. We can rebuild that lost trust with straight talk that recognizes the realities of the modern economy. So, paradoxically, the alliance begins with managers acknowledging that great employees might leave the company, and with employees being honest about their own career aspirations. By putting this new alliance at the heart of your talent management strategy, you'll not only bring back trust, you'll be able to recruit and retain the entrepreneurial individuals you need to adapt to a fast-changing world.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
13mentions
10people
2015–2026years
62% recommend38% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I thought after Netflix's culture deck and Reed Hoffman's book Alliance, it would be pretty clear that a company is not a family. It could an alliance, it could be a professional sports team, or it could be some business entity, but definitely not a family. I particularly like the concept of alliance, as it reflects the reality. Well, I guess the memo is not as well known as I thought.
- manager-tools.com : a series of superb podcast. Pay for the personal license; $200/year is worth it.
Read "The Alliance" by Reed Hoffman.
My best advice:
- weekly 1:1s - accept that you will not be as knowledgeable about everything (lack of time) - establish expectations at the very beginning - start off with realizing that no one will retire from the current company. Let your directs know that at some point you expect they will move on. This is so liberating.
- You should give "The Alliance" by Reid Hoffman a read. Excellent book - the first half, anyway - and I think it might give you a different perspective (or at least some food for thought).
- Obviously books:
[!] 1) The 360° Leader, John C. Maxwell
2) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink
3) The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha & Chris Yeh
[!] 4) It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy, Michael Abrashoff
5) Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, Frederic Laloux
6) Immature People with Power How to Handle Them, Larry Mullins
7) Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Eric Berne
In no particular order. That kind of list could be endless, but 1-7 I consider the most important ones (you can throw away (5) if you aren't interested in how to simplify corp structures) regarding shaping anyone into a reasonable leader. It's all about: attitude, values, understanding oneself and other people.
The only reason I'm putting all of this here is because it's a good investment. I hope you will read those, because I don't recommend stuff I know nothing about to random people ;) This world desperately needs better managers, not another infantile prick who thinks he gets it (I'm not pointing that to @OP directly, it's a more general problem). Again, I can only hope that the 10 minutes I've spent here are going to blossom in the future as at least one good guy who knows what he is doing because he thinks about what he's going to do beforehand. If that's not going to happen that's going to be on you (and I will find you and then we're going to have an unpleasant conversation). Meanwhile, I highly recommend the mentioned books and reading in general. This is how you can easily distinguish yourself from a herd of management sheeple who consider reading to be harmful for their egos ;) Howk!
A general tip: I've written "books, obviously", because management is on of those disciplines where there ARE good books, as well as good trainings available. The books route is far less expensive, it's as good as let's say expensive couching, and there's some space between the lines in books in general one can utilize for thinking for oneself!
All of the above comes form my own experience.
- Thought I would add my own thoughts to the difficulty here and just talk about the process I brought into the last place I worked at. I came in as a Director at a time when the company had a...let's say not too great set of developers overall from a skill level perspective (the company thought they were amazing! That's maybe a story for another time). I'm proud of the process I introduced there because it led to my meeting and befriending some top tier gentlemen. While it may not work for everyone (and I understand it perhaps weeds out some candidates) it seemed to do all right. Here it is, for anyone to steal if you so feel it useful:
* Candidate applies * Within 24 hours, the candidate has a personal reply from our in-house recruiter. That E-mail explains the entire interview process and sets up a brief 15-20 min phone screen with the candidate.
1) The phone screen is mostly nothing more than a brief "psychopath test" (is this person nice to talk to or are they rude or condescending?). The recruiter talks to them about their own goals, aspirations - if we approached them, we skip the "why do you want to work here" part otherwise we ask them what appealed to them.
2) The candidate is given a take-home assignment (which has no time limit but has been vetted against internal staff to take no more than really about an hour), with a note attached that says "Hey, you're likely a great and talented candidate and I'm well aware that you may be thinking that this is a waste of your valuable time. What I can assure you is that a) I'm only doing this because our industry is a sewer ;), with no real standardized screenings b) As discussed in the first E-mail, there are no further technical "screenings" coming forward - if we go to the next phase, we'll just discuss your approach to the assignment for a bit and then it's "getting to know you" time.
Internally, this technical assignment is not one where two reviewers can have different "reads"; there are things we're explicitly looking for to determine overall "level", mainly with readability, approach, things like that (as just one example, a senior level candidate will know about unit testing and show something along those lines in their solution).
3) Someone reviews the submission. We reply within 48 hours.
3a) If the candidate is a no fly we don't go forward, and tell them so. If the candidate asks why, I tell them explicitly what the assignment was looking for, provide links to get acquainted with those and encourage them to reapply at a later date (we hired someone who did exactly this - those are the kind of passionate ones you want to be working with).
3b) Candidate is a go-forward;
the next step of the interview is simply a discussion about "The Alliance" (Reid Hoffman, great book, at least the first half) of what they'd like to do with their career and whether the company can harmonize that into something both parties are happy with, and a getting to know the candidate a bit deeply. I told candidates explicitly at this point not to stress, as this wasn't an interrogation but simply us understanding that - to tie this back to the original posting - they were interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them.
Our hire quality sharply increased after that. I left the company a year and a half ago but that process is still in place, relatively unaltered. In fact, one person left the company, went to another company and basically "stole" that interviewing approach because he thought it was so good for finding people but also treating them with respect (which is critically important).
TL-DR; our industry, particularly around hiring, really sucks and it's an absolute crapshoot on both sides of the equation. It's sad and really depressing; I try not to spend too much time thinking about it and more time trying to mitigate it in my small corners of the world. =) I wish it were different.
- Thought I would add my own thoughts to the difficulty here and just talk about the process I brought into the last place I worked at. I came in as a Director at a time when the company had a...let's say not too great set of developers overall from a skill level perspective (the company thought they were amazing! That's maybe a story for another time). I'm proud of the process I introduced there because it led to my meeting and befriending some top tier gentlemen. While it may not work for everyone (and I understand it perhaps weeds out some candidates) it seemed to do all right. Here it is, for anyone to steal if you so feel it useful:
* Candidate applies * Within 24 hours, the candidate has a personal reply from our in-house recruiter. That E-mail explains the entire interview process in detail and sets up a brief 15-20 min phone screen with the candidate if they're okay with said process.
1) The phone screen is mostly nothing more than a brief "psychopath test" (is this person nice to talk to or are they rude or condescending?). The recruiter talks to them about their own goals, aspirations - if we approached them, we skip the "why do you want to work here" part otherwise we ask them what appealed to them.
2) The candidate is given a take-home assignment (which has no time limit but has been vetted against internal staff to take no more than really about an hour), with a note attached that says "Hey, you're likely a great and talented candidate and I'm well aware that you may be thinking that this is a waste of your valuable time. What I can assure you is that a) I'm only doing this because our industry is a sewer ;), with no real standardized screenings b) As discussed in the first E-mail, there are no further technical "screenings" coming forward - if we go to the next phase, we'll just discuss your approach to the assignment for a bit and then it's "getting to know you" time. Internally, this technical assignment is not one where two reviewers can have different "reads"; there are things we're explicitly looking for to determine overall "level", mainly with readability, approach, things like that (as just one example, a senior level candidate will know about unit testing and show something along those lines in their solution).
3) Someone reviews the submission. We reply within 48 hours.
3a) If the candidate is a no fly we don't go forward, and tell them so. If the candidate asks why, I tell them explicitly what the assignment was looking for, provide links to get acquainted with those and encourage them to reapply at a later date (we hired someone who did exactly this - those are the kind of passionate ones you want to be working with).
3b) Candidate is a go-forward; the next step of the interview is simply a discussion about "The Alliance" (Reid Hoffman, great book, at least the first half) of what they'd like to do with their career and whether the company can harmonize that into something both parties are happy with, and a getting to know the candidate a bit deeply. I told candidates explicitly at this point not to stress, as this wasn't an interrogation but simply us understanding that - to tie this back to the original posting - they were interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them.
Our hire quality sharply increased after that. I left the company a year and a half ago but that process is still in place, relatively unaltered. In fact, one person left the company, went to another company and basically "stole" that interviewing approach because he thought it was so good for finding people but also treating them with respect (which is critically important and all too rare).
TL-DR; our industry, particularly around hiring, really sucks and it's an absolute crapshoot on both sides of the equation. It's sad and really depressing; I try not to spend too much time thinking about it and more time trying to mitigate it in my small corners of the world. =) I wish it were different.
