A friend recently recommended a book titled “The Alliance”. He said it provided a relevant narrative for how all of us might think about building our companies here in Silicon Valley. So I ordered the book, not paying attention to the authors or copyright date — I figured it was a brand new book and probably written by some writer from Fast Company, Wired, or Buzzfeed. When I received the book a couple days later via Amazon I chuckled when seeing that it was co-authored by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, that it came out in 2014, and that I had heard of the “tour of duty” analogy back when the book came out, but hadn’t grabbed a copy back then. I really wish I had read “The Alliance” when it came out four years ago.
“The Alliance” hits on a crucial topic for today’s Silicon Valley — and really every workplace in the world. In the book, the term “alliance” defines the important relationship that must be created between employees (or “team members”) and employers (or “the company”, and “executive team” who often represent the company in the eyes of team members). Hoffman and his co-authors cover a lot of ground in “The Alliance” and they cite a number of real-life examples from LinkedIn and other bigger companies so the translation to folks in earlier stage start-ups or non-tech companies outside Silicon Valley may not come through crystal clear. However, when you hone in on the core message of the book, three really important themes emerge that can absolutely be applied to any company or organization, for profit or non-profit, early stage or super late stage like Google or Microsoft. In no particular order, these important take aways include the importance of building trust between everyone in the company, defining a culture centered on an authentic team dynamic, and establishing an important alliance between team members and management that delivers mutual benefit to both of these groups.
No dynamic is more important between team members and a company’s management than trust. “The Alliance” describes why trust has perhaps reached an all-time low in workplaces today based on how companies put the bottom line ahead of team member growth while these same team members view themselves as “free agents” willing to move from company to company looking for the next best thing. Reading “The Alliance” hit home the simple truth that so much of a company’s long-term success is based on a foundation of trust that can support a shared desire of team members and management to deliver both impact for users and sustainability by profitably serving customers. There’s an elegant “Impact + Sustainability built on Trust” framework that jumped out at me from the book (something that I might write about in the future). As “The Alliance” describes:
“Trust in the business world…is near an all-time low. A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that’s unable to invest in the future. And a business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies — well, that’s a company already in the process of dying”
A second critical point made by Hoffman et al is the clarification that companies leave and breath as “teams” not “families”. I’ve always thought of it this way — often citing the John Wooden quote: “It’s amazing what a team can do when nobody cares who gets the credit.” Teams of players (or team members) and coaches (or managers) provide the perfect analogy for business. Experiencing team “chemistry” comes when you can place the best players in the right positions and combine those great players with coaches whose sole focus is to support team members to play the best they’ve ever played. Further, when players and coaches come together to focus on clear goals that define what winning looks like, to execute a game plan (or a strategy that combines impact and sustainability), and to collaborate on a foundation of unquestionable trust, that’s when you have the chance to experience something special as a team and as a company. As “The Alliance” describes:
“In this sense, a business is far more like a sports team than a family…Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success.”
Finally, the central take home from “The Alliance” is a simple description of how team members and the company should partner in the context of a team ethos built on trust. You see, historically this relationship has been fraught with mistrust and defined in a very transactional manner. For decades companies viewed team members as merely a production input, no different than capital expenditures and the consumption of commodity resources. As companies impersonalized their relationship with team members, these team members in return developed their own impersonal relationship with companies. Each role at a company represented a mere stopover for the team member — and opportunity to add some skills and knowledge, develop a talent or two, and then move on to the next station. Transactions don’t scale, relationships do. Thus, “The Alliance” describes a simple yet powerful relationship that should exist between team members and companies, one built on a mutual desire to build long-term value together:
“This employment alliance provides the framework managers and employees need for the trust and investment to build powerful businesses and careers. In an alliance, employer and employee develop a relationship based on how they can add value to each other. Employers need to tell their employees, ‘Help make our company more valuable, and we’ll make you more valuable.”
Today’s workplace needs to be about building relationships, and no relationship is more vital than the alliance that develops between team members and their company. If managers openly speak to the important tone of trust and in parallel embrace the power of team, they establish a firm foundation from which to form a meaningful alliance. This alliance must jointly support growth for the team member and the company, essentially a relationship that yields mutual benefit for team members and the company. Hoffman and crew highlight the critical role managers play in companies today:
“But we also recognize that the people who bear the primary responsibility for putting the alliance into practice are, in fact, managers.”
Indeed, managers committed to supporting alliances built on trust, team, and mutual benefit determine in large part the path that both team members and their companies take over the long-haul.
Originally published on Medium on March 3, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.