Changing my mind
When an employee would leave our startup in the early years of building the company, I took departures personally, often feeling resentment toward the exiting employee for not being open about their desire to leave earlier on, for abandoning the ship, and on and on.
My co-founder looked at those types of situations much differently. His view was that the responsibility of retention was the company’s, not the employee’s. While I believed we wanted to attract employees who wanted to work with us for years, he believed that we should intentionally strive to create culture that would springboard, or graduate, young-in-career people into other companies after 24-36 months.
Looking back on those two mindsets now, I can see their origins. Whereas I’d almost exclusively worked at my own company, he’d had stints at a large tech-company and a venture-backed retail company. Both had been incredible learning opportunities that had accelerated his operating skills, and both employers had expected that he’d contribute for 2-3 years, and then move up or move on.
Over time, my views on this subject shifted toward those of my co-founder, but it wasn’t until I read Reid Hoffman’s Alliance, that the relationship, and more specifically the compact, between employer and employee began to feel clear. That clarity came from the historical lens into the employee/employer compact and its evolution throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The Compact
Hoffman lays it out like this — for most of the 20th century, the relationship between employer and employee was all about stability. Employers expected career-employees, and in return employees could expect predictable career progression within the company over the course of three-ish decades, followed by comfortable pensions after a career’s worth of service.
Then, in the last two decades of the 20th century, things started to change.
As Venktash Rao has noted, “paycheck employment peaked around 1980, and from there, the labor market became increasingly gigified.”
With the 90’s came the acceleration of globalization after nearly 50 years of cold war, the commercialization of the internet, and the emergence within the workforce of Gen-Xers and young Millennials — the first two generations to have grown up with access to personal computers. For Hoffman, the inflection points of the 90s led to rapid and unpredictable change that demolished the stable compact between employers and employees.
For Hoffman, most companies responded to these changes poorly, and a new and problematic arrangement emerged. If the business needed to cut costs, it would lay employees off. If the business needed new skills, it would hire different employees.
This response created a dishonest conversation between employers and employees and ended up incentivizing employees to think of themselves as free agents.
Alliance & Tour of Duty
Hoffman’s basic criticism of what happened — and what continues to happen — looks something like this:
Employers hire employees and wrongly pitch the idea that employees will “join the family.” This is a falsehood, because unlike family members, employers can fire employees anytime they wish.
Employees join companies and profess their commitment to “the family.” This is also a falsehood, because employees often leave the company as soon as they have a better offer in hand.
Rather than entering into false bonds of loyalty, Hoffman argues that it would be better and more honest if both parties sought the mutual benefits of alliance. The solution he’s proposing is that both parties — companies & employees — commit to “stop thinking of employees as family or free agents, and start thinking of them as allies on a tour of duty.”
In this arrangement, employers get the best performance out of their employees for committed time periods, or missions. Employees get paid accordingly, but also get the assurance that during their tour of duty, the employer will be committed to up-leveling their skills so that once the tour is complete, they are distinctly more marketable.
What do you want out of your time in this role?
I used to ask people who’d recently joined our company this question. And I’ve continued asking it while building a team within a larger organization. Typically the person will share a thoughtful answer that highlights their aspirations to do good work, have positive impact, enjoy working with their teammates, and learn a lot in the process. Sometimes, the person will extend further into the career escalation that they hope comes from high performance in the role. And then always, the person will ask me what I hope to see from their time in the role. The answer has become consistent over the last few years: that you find daily reward in the mission, and that when you’ve completed the mission, you feel empowered by the time you’ve spent here — that the skills you’ve sharpened, the knowledge you’ve acquired, and the people you’ve impacted, have increased your optionality.