<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"There will come a time when your brightest, most beloved employee will want to leave. Reid Hoffman says you\u00A0should let her go\u2014or at least, in many instances. On July 8, the king\u00A0of social networks himself, who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, will publish a radical book of advice for managers called The Alliance, and it&amp;#8217;s worth a read. A\u00A0follow-up to his 2011 blockbuster The Start-Up of You, this instructional manual makes a strong case\u00A0that managers should rethink the very essence of the relationships they strike with employees. Along with\u00A0co-writers Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh, Hoffman argues that no one goes to work for one company forever anymore, and that managers shouldn&amp;#8217;t pretend they do. Instead, employees and employers should agree upon\u00A0short increments of work to accomplish together much like a military\u00A0tour of duty. Once the work is complete, they should meet to reevaluate what happens next. I recently sat down\u00A0with Hoffman, who joined the prominent Silicon Valley VC firm Greylock Partners in 2009,\u00A0to discuss how his ideas translate into practice. Below, our conversation (edited for clarity):\nYou discuss thinking about increments of work as tours of duty, a term you take from the military. How do you convey that to employees?\nYou should actually have conversations with your employees to say, what would your dream job be, whether it\u2019s here or somewhere else? How do we align our interests where it\u2019s working for both of us that you are on your path?\nThat\u2019s easy when an employee arrives knowing what she wants to do, but very often people don\u2019t. They arrive wanting a job.\nThey want a job and they want success. They want some notion of, \u201CI\u2019m making progress.\u201D You want to align that instinct to things that are very helpful to the company. The classic thing for decades was:\u00A0Be\u00A0a good company person. And sometimes it plays out that way. But what you want to do is say, we are much happier when you\u2019ve made a huge amount of progress. If the consequence is you stay at the company, that\u2019s okay. And if the consequence is, you move on, that\u2019s okay too. We want to make that all very healthy.\nSo you\u2019re encouraging potentially talented people to leave?\nIf that\u2019s what\u2019s right for them. One consequence: companies are generating a lot more young alumni than they used to have. It used to be that alumni were 65 and played golf. Now you have alumni who worked here from age 25 to 30 and are now doing other things. How do you stay engaged with those alumni and how is that helpful to you?\nYou talked about John Donahoe and eBay as a good example. How did that work and what have the results been like?\nThe eBay alumni network runs a set of services\u2014the most prominent is events\u2014where they invite alumni back to the events to keep a relationship going with the company. You\u00A0never build a relationship with a \u201Cgive me something.\u201D You just build the relationship and good things come out of them. I think they have alumni referring new employees. They\u2019ve gotten intelligence about how technology is evolving and how eBay should react. They\u2019ve hosted a dinner with some of the Paypal folks, for example, to say, how do you think Paypal should evolve? Where are payments going?\nYou talk about attempting to codify the relationships that people in your organization have with outsiders. You give some examples of that. How does this\u00A0work at Greylock?\nWe publicize in a huddle on Monday morning, who are all the different people that folks are meeting with this week? Then [if there&amp;#8217;s a relevant fact or relationship to bring up]\u00A0people say, \u201CThis would be something useful for you to know.\u201D\nThere\u2019s a constant pressure on workers to prepare themselves for the jobs of the future without abandoning the jobs they have; at the same time, because they stay in jobs for shorter periods, they often have less opportunity for professional development. How do people prepare?\nIn terms of professional skills it&amp;#8217;s\u00A0no longer useful to think about the industrial model. I train and train and then I am ready. Rather, it&amp;#8217;s\u00A0like agile programming\u2014continual adaptation. There are two forms of continual adaptation.\u00A0The first is picking up intelligence on the job. [And that can happen in lots of ways.]\u00A0For example, you can\u00A0expense a lunch meeting and bring intelligence back to the organization. The second way skills retraining happens\u00A0is in more bite-size chunks that occur\u00A0in a much more adaptive and ongoing way. Instead of, say, going to business school and returning, [employees can learn] in\u00A0conferences and\u00A0briefings&amp;#8230;.\u00A0Two-week classes, for example. You can easily see professional certifications happening via remote learning over the Internet.\nWhy did you write this book?\nThere\u2019s an underlying broken notion in thinking about how an employer and an employee relate to each other. The breakage goes to two factors. One is, \u201Cwell we\u2019re still doing the lifetime employment of all the people we like\u201D\u2014wink, wink, nudge, nudge. In that conversation, the company and employee are lying to each other. Both know that\u2019s not the modern world. We&amp;#8217;ve swung to the opposite extreme of one-day employment contracts, where either side is ready and willing to cut off the relationship whenever convenient. The lack of trust hinders innovation and long-term collaboration.\nWhat do you want people to take away from it?\nPart of living in the networked age is there are always a bunch more smart people that you don\u2019t know than you do know. The question is, as a manager, how do you navigate your group to take advantage of that fact. One\u00A0trade-off of having some people move on is good: bringing in new blood. That brings in a whole raft of new information, network access, changes in what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s also good to have people you have good relationships with go to other places because when the relationship continues, that becomes an intelligence stream back.\nThe career, then, is a combination or products, not a series of titles. People have this model of thinking about the progression of careers as a ladder of titles. That ladder of titles now means a lot less. What actually matters is a sequence of projects. The Alliance says, here is a way you can manage groups and people on sequences or projects where you can accomplish great things.\nSo what as a manager can you do for your employees? You can\u2019t guarantee them lifetime employment, but you can give them lifetime employability. That\u2019s when you have been awesome to your people.\n&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2014/06/16/reid-hoffman-let-talented-employees-quit/>