Managing Talent in the Networked Age

Companies (employers) often lose its valuable employees because of lack of harmonious relationship. Loyality of an employee becomes expensive in  at-will era like today where companies are focusing on hitting short-term financial target to boost stock prices. An inability of companies in managing their talents makes them difficult to generate innovation so that they lost the competition and dying. So, an approach of employer-employee relationship is required to answer that problem.

 

The Alliance offers a new relationship framework between employer and employee in a networked age like today. The Alliance propose a new type of loyalty that allows companies and employees to commit and add value to each other. This new type views the company as a sports team and family at the same time that defines how we work together and toward what purpose and how we treat each other—with compassion, appreciation, and respect. Apart for being required to have founder mind-set, both employer and employee must have tour of duty. In The Alliance both company and employee have mutual investment that will generate big cumulative returns in the years to come. 

 

The tour of duty represents an ethical commitment by employer and employee to a specific mission. This approach can relieve the pressure on you and your employees alike because it builds trust incrementally. The tour of duty that is very greatly based on the person, company, functional area, industry, and job title can be categorized into three type; rotational, transformational, and foundational. The point of the tour of duty framework is to enable a high-trust, high-integrity conversation that allows both sides to make wise investments, whatever the length of the tour. Beside that, it is required to have an alignment that means to seek and highlight the commonality between the company’s purpose and values and the employee’s career purpose and values to form a winning team. 

 

Today, both company and employee need to look outward toward the overall environment in which they operate, especially when it comes to networks. Network intelligence is the most effective way for the organization to engage with and learn from the outside world. Right now, that network becomes a valuable asset that helps the company. This book shows to us how to implement network intelligence programs  step-by-step. 

 

The book that consist of eight chapters is a best practice from experience by a founder LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, in looking how managing talent in practice nowadays. This book enrich with several case studies from startup actors in its each chapter, also there are advice for manager and tactical reminder which is very applicable. There is special part “Walking the walk” that talking about how LinkedIn run The Alliance strategy that make this book richer. It is just, theoretically discourse related to managing talent needs to be studied further. 

 

*This book review was individual assignment of People in Organization (PIO) Class 2021