What will someone hear when they reference check you with your previous employers?

Research suggests people most remember the peaks and endings of experiences. In other words: the best parts and how an experience ends.

By this logic, your ex colleagues will likely remember the best things you did at the company and what you did in your final ~90 days on the job.

So if you work in an interconnected industry where reference checks happen and personal brand reigns supreme, it’s key to nail the ending. (Your personal brand largely equals what other people say about you.)

There’s so much career advice about crushing your first 90 days on a job. Indeed, one of the bestselling career books of all time is titled The First 90 Days.

But there’s little written about how to nail your last 90 days.

Here are a few specific tips for an employee wrapping up a job where they have a high trust relationship with their manager:

• Honorably complete your tour of duty. As we write in The Alliance, the structure of tours of duty facilitates non-awkward ways to talk about transitions. It’s crucial to finish what you ethically committed to do.
• Talk to your manager when you want to start interviewing for new gigs. Interviewing for new jobs behind your current manager’s back destroys trust. Broach the topic in the context of wrapping up your current tour of duty. This requires a high trust relationship that not every employee has, to be sure.
• Sprint through the tape. Everyone will remember how you finish. If you’ve already lined up your next job, it can be tempting to lame duck your way to your final day. Do the opposite: work overtime to deliver accomplishments, and cement your personal brand — in the minds of the people who’ll be your references — as synonymous with selfless excellence.
• Document and invest in succession planning. Show a real interest in making your successor successful — even if you’ve already formally transitioned out of the gig. People will remember these sorts of displays of team-first professionalism.

TL/DR: When future employers call your previous managers and do a reference check, your ex colleagues will remember your best moments and how you ended. Be great at your last 90 days.

Dan Lyons’ op/ed in the New York Times last week misrepresented The Alliance in a big way. His op/ed was promoting his new book, which bashes HubSpot, a company he worked at for a couple years. In his book, there is a brief but even more distorted description of the tour of duty framework. Reid, Chris, and I wrote a response to correct the record, and we published it on Chris’s LinkedIn page. Excerpt:

The Alliance is an attempt to find a better way for companies and employees to relate to each other. Specifically, we suggest companies and employees build trust incrementally and choreograph increasing levels of mutual commitment by defining “Tours of Duty.” A tour of duty, which might last anywhere from six months to six years depending on its mission, ought to spell out what an employee is trying to accomplish, how achieving it benefits the company, and how that achievement accelerates the employee’s career. As a tour of duty draws to a close, the manager and employee meet to discuss a follow-up tour. By giving employees a clear sense of career development, we’ve found that companies that adopt the Alliance Framework improve employee retention and lengthen job tenures. Loyalty builds over time, as both sides make and keep their mutual promises to invest in each other.

In his book, Dan writes, “Hoffman says employees should think of a job as a ‘tour of duty’ and not expect to stay for too long.” In fact, in The Alliance, we write at length about the perils of short termism. We tell the story of an employee who worked at one company (LinkedIn) for nine years and completed three distinct tours, and conclude: “This seeming contradiction— regularly changing roles in the context of a long-term relationship— is the essence of the tour of duty framework.”

At the heart of our framework is the importance of building high-trust relationships. In The Alliance, we write, “Our goal is to provide a framework for moving from a transactional to a relational approach…By building a mutually beneficial alliance rather than simply exchanging money for time, employer and employee can invest in the relationship and take the risks necessary to pursue bigger payoffs.” Here’s how Dan describes our framework: “In [Hoffman’s] view, a job is a transaction, one in which an employee provides a service, gets paid, and moves on.” It makes you wonder whether he actually read our book!

During a recent keynote speech, I made a point that is central in The Alliance and central to our consulting work at Allied Talent: If you develop a reputation — as a manager, as a team, as an organization — for being a career launch pad instead of a career parking lot, the best people in the industry will do anything to work with you.

As a longtime viewer of Big Think videos, I was delighted to sit down with them to record a bit on The Alliance and future of work. It’s me for three minutes with their famous white background, talking straight at the camera:

I wrote a piece on LinkedIn about compassionate management as a fundamental philosophy behind The Alliance. You can check out the post here — it’s been getting some traction. It opens this way:

In The Alliance, we attempt to resolve one of the most difficult questions of modern management: how do you build strong, long-term relationships with employees when you cannot guarantee lifetime employment and when employees do not pledge lifelong loyalty?

 

I then go on to describe how to build trust through really understanding your team member.

I also reflect a bit on hearing management legend Ken Blanchard speak at the Blanchard Summit, where I recently keynoted.