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.

Decentralizing with proximity

The second organization that has faced some of the same challenges is the Chinese white goods company Haier, but it has come up with entirely different answers. Between 2011 and 2017, I went to China and several other foreign locations with my IESE Business School colleagues Yih-Teen Lee and the late Carlos Sanchez-Runde to observe Haier’s unique management model up close.

Under Haier’s model, called RenDanHeYi, employees are expected to behave like entrepreneurs. There is no formal hierarchy. Instead, employees are directly accountable to their customers, and they operate on the principle of “zero distance to the customer.” To get close to their clients, employees work through roughly 4,000 autonomous units called microenterprises, comparable to startups but within firm boundaries.

These microenterprises are free to make strategic decisions in pursuit of value creation for their customers, recruit staff and distribute profits. Haier acts as an investor in each microenterprise and supplies them with resources, essentially creating a market within the firm. In the words of one director: “Haier doesn’t give you a job. You work in an open market. You need to find your own job and the resources to meet your goals.”

Within this internal market, employees remain mobile, as microenterprises are perpetually established and disbanded. Haier’s organizational boundaries are also porous, as microenterprises are encouraged to cultivate relationships with external partners.

To make this organizational model work, without each microenterprise drifting apart from core missions, there are some key features.

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.

Autonomy, Accountability and Alignment

Neither the Snarky Puppy nor the Haier model is possible without what I call the AAA framework, standing for Autonomy, Accountability and Alignment.

In a typical organization, managers define work tasks and interfaces, and then evaluate results. As a result, accountability and alignment are inherently built into the formal work structure.

For companies that grant more autonomy, there’s an unofficial fourth A: alternatives. Put simply, the company needs to think about alternative means to craft additional accountability structures and provide more alignment. This might mean encouraging more feedback among peers to complement manager-led control. Or it might mean requiring staff to define, negotiate and regularly revise expectations to better align with other units.

Snarky Puppy’s solution to AAA is the demo, requiring each musician to learn all parts. Haier does it by having employees keep their own P&L statements, and their key objectives and performance indicators are tracked daily and displayed publicly. In Haier’s early days, footprints were painted on the factory floor, and each evening the lowest performers would step onto them and share their mistakes. Today, the footprints remain, though the approach is different. Top performers share best practices, or they hold group review meetings on the footprints to define and review targets. Frequent check-ins ensure continuous, sustained proximity among workers who might otherwise drift into unproductive disconnection.

Less conventional ways of working are not for every organization nor for every employee. Snarky Puppy’s musicians work within an ecosystem in which gig work is already the norm. Haier’s employees are often self-selecting, with those requiring a more predictable workplace choosing to go elsewhere while those with an entrepreneurial mindset flourish.

But one thing is for sure: Autonomy, done without sacrificing proximity, can lead to truly spectacular results.

MORE INFO:

This article is adapted from the book Proximity: How to balance belonging and difference in today’s workplace by B. Sebastian Reiche (Bloomsbury, 2026).

This article forms part of IESE Business School Insight online magazine No. 173 (Sept.-Dec. 2026) and was also included in the special annual print edition, Insight for Global Leaders No. 2 (2026).

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