Here is a brief excerpt from an article co-authored by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh for the Wall Street Journal. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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The employment relationship is broken.

In an era of at-will employment, company loyalty is scarce and long-time ties are scarcer. “It’s just business” has become the ruling philosophy—especially when layoffs hit—and workers are encouraged to think of themselves as “free agents.”

Yet bosses and hiring managers still ask workers to commit to the company without committing to them in return. This creates a relationship built on mutual self-deception.

It’s time for a new way of doing business: the Alliance and the tour of duty framework.

When Reid first founded LinkedIn Corp., he offered an explicit deal to talented employees: If they signed up for a 2-4 year tour of duty and made an important contribution to some part of the business, Reid and the company would help advance their careers, preferably in the form of another tour of duty at LinkedIn. This approach worked: the company got an engaged employee who worked to achieve tangible results for LinkedIn. The employee transformed his career by en­hancing his portfolio of skills and experiences.

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The finite term of the tour of duty provides crisper focus and a mutually agreeable time frame for discussing the future of the relationship. It gives a valued employee concrete and compelling reasons to “stick it out” and finish a tour. Most importantly, a realistic tour of duty lets both sides be honest, which is a necessity for trust.

We have defined three different flavors of the tour of duty: Rotational, Transformational, and Foundational. For your star employees, a Transformational tour is best. It’s negotiated one-on-one by you and your employee, and is defined by the completion of a specific, mutually beneficial mission.

The central promise of a Transformational tour is that the employee will have the opportunity to trans­form his career by transforming the company’s business. And as a Transformational tour of duty enters its final stage, you and your employee can start to negotiate a follow-up tour of duty to keep the employee at the company.

Making a real commitment also allows an employee to accomplish something substantive. Google Inc. chairman Eric Schmidt told us he also likes to define tours in terms of five years—a couple of years to learn, a couple of years to do the job and scale the projects, and a year to arrange the transi­tion.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh are the co-authors of The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, published July 8 by the Harvard Business Review Press. Hoffman is the executive chairman and co-founder of LinkedIn Corp. and a partner at venture capitalist firm Greylock; Casnocha and Yeh are San Francisco-based entrepreneurs.