From the course: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh on Creating an Alliance with Employees

Collaborating to align the employee, manager, and company

From the course: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh on Creating an Alliance with Employees

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Collaborating to align the employee, manager, and company

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- So now that you've figured out the company's mission and values. You've figured out your individual employee's values and aspirations. You have to figure out how to bring them all together. Now unfortunately, it's not the case that everything's gonna line up neatly. There's never gonna be a perfect fit. We often talk about this as being a Venn diagram, you with the circles that are overlapping? It's never the case that the circles are gonna fully overlap, but you wanna strive for the greatest degree of alignment that you can because all that extra alignment is going to make it easier for the employee to actually achieve their goals, and easier for the company to achieve its business objectives. The three key questions you have to answer are, first of all, what is the objective of the tour of duty? The objective, which is a very concrete thing that you're trying to achieve, is what ties together the mission of the company and its intended business results with the employee's aspirations and where their career wants to go. So defining that objective in a clear and detailed way is critical to building alignment. The next question and answer is, what is the company getting out of that tour of duty? How does accomplishing that tour of duty and achieving that objective transform the company's business? This allows the company to understand why supporting this tour of duty is so important. Finally, you have to answer the question, how does achieving this objective help the employee achieve their career development goals? Every time an employee undertakes a tour of duty, they're doing it because it's going to help push that employees career forward. You have to be crystal clear about how achieving that objective is going to do so. Once you have these three questions answered, a tour of duty is an almost magical tool for achieving alignment between the employer and the employee because each party knows exactly what it's going to do and what it's getting out of it.

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