Transform your teams through proximity

Embrace the side hustle

When League set out to form a band, he encountered a challenge that most startups and scale-ups know only too well: The talent was already committed elsewhere. To deal with this, he offered musicians the possibility of trying out his new band while maintaining their own projects — essentially, the promise of flexibility. It worked, and more than 20 years later, League remains the only full-time member of the ensemble.

Though it might seem counterintuitive to build a team in which everyone has a professional leg elsewhere, the Snarky Puppy model reflects some broader labor market trends, such as the desire for flexibility to fulfill one’s passions.

Research has shown that allowing employees their side hustle can actually boost their full-time job performance. It makes workers feel more empowered, resulting in positive emotions that they carry over into their day jobs, raising their performance overall. While being thrown into too many parallel projects can be overwhelming, being able to control the professional activities that are close to your heart is mentally engaging. And the more you have a highly motivated, high-performing team, the more you attract others in kind, achieving the desirable state known as “talent density.”

Make team members (in a positive sense) replaceable

Imagine you lead a team whose membership changes on a weekly basis. It is easy to foresee the chaos that might ensue unless team members can seamlessly slot in whenever it is their turn and hit the ground running. League’s solution is to have all musicians think like producers.

Producers need to understand the big picture of an entire song. While a typical musician tends to focus on learning his or her own part, Snarky Puppy members learn all parts of every song in their entirety, even though they might only play a few notes. This is essential because anyone may be asked on short notice to step in and fill a gap in a concert, and while members don’t need to play all instruments, they must know all parts of the song’s melody on their own.

Transferring this idea to corporate teams, it would be a tough sell to ask a customer relationship manager in a technology company to suddenly assume software maintenance tasks for a client. It could be argued that this isn’t an efficient way to operate. Why should people focus on the whole when their expertise is in one part? Yet it could also be argued that understanding some of the specifics of software maintenance would help the relationship manager better serve clients. Learning about colleagues’ roles might even lead to workflow improvements and innovation.

Create a demo culture

A fluid empowered team may cater to people’s need for distinctiveness and freedom, but how do you ensure high-level synchronous performance when most of the team’s interactions occur asynchronously and over distance? When rehearsals or meetings are impossible across time zones, how do you get everyone on the same page? This challenge calls for clear alignment.

At Snarky Puppy, uniting the team begins with every new composition. Each member is empowered to contribute ideas during composition and performance. However, whoever writes a song needs to draft it fully. Musicians present their compositions as a digital demo, which is available virtually and includes all different sections and parts. To provide more impetus for members to learn all parts of the new song, the demo doesn’t audibly differentiate between instruments.

Think of a demo as a minimum viable product, like startups use to secure venture funding or that product development teams present to obtain seed funding. In other words, a demo is a prototype that offers a taster and sketches a product’s main features. It provides direction and vision to the team, connecting everyone around a shared goal. In this sense, it is a source of alignment.

Snarky Puppy keeps the demo simple: Each song has a strong melody line, which is the glue that holds everything together, giving band members something to riff off, while offering easy recall to the audience. The time each musician must invest individually in learning the demo may be higher, but this means their collective meeting time will decline considerably.

In fact, collective rehearsal time is so drastically reduced that the band typically only rehearses once before recording a new album or immediately before going on tour. It is not that musicians spend more or less time on the job — they just spend their time differently.

Make employees take ownership of their ideas

Say you’re working in Haier’s refrigerator unit and you have an idea for a fridge with a separate temperature gauge for each compartment, so wine, meat and vegetables can all be kept at optimum temperatures. It seems like something clients might like.

In this scenario, you would need to test your idea with prospective customers and write up a business plan. Your idea needs to be compelling and well devised because it will compete with other internal entrepreneurial projects.

You will also have to seek external funding before Haier will invest additional resources to develop your idea. Once financing has been secured, you create your microenterprise, hire employees and develop agreements with other microenterprises, such as the design unit that will model your product and the production unit that will manufacture it.

You will have full autonomy, like being the CEO of an independent company, but you are not untouchable. Fixed salaries are modest at Haier; most remuneration is performance-based. If you don’t achieve certain targets, fellow members of the microenterprise may vote you out of leadership. And if the enterprise fails, it will be disbanded and everyone will return to the internal talent market.