Technical Leadership and Glue Work
Central idea
Glue work can make a team succeed while quietly stalling the career of the person doing it unless the work is allocated, framed, and rewarded deliberately.
Summary
Glue work is the coordination that holds a team together: onboarding, connecting people, reviewing designs, curating the roadmap, noticing dropped work, talking to users, and unblocking decisions. It is often technical leadership, but it produces fewer visible artifacts than code. People who are naturally helpful—especially those not yet recognized as senior—can accumulate so much glue work that they stop developing the skills their promotion system measures. The answer is not to dismiss glue work. Teams should distribute it intentionally, senior people should take a fair share, managers should name and reward its impact, and individuals should choose it in proportion to the career path they actually want.
Key ideas
Important is not always promotable
A task can be essential to delivery yet absent from the formal evidence used in promotion decisions.
Make invisible impact legible
Describe the project outcomes, decisions, people enabled, and failures avoided—not merely the meetings attended.
Choose your skill portfolio
Do enough glue work to develop leadership, but protect time for the technical or management skills your next role requires.
Manage glue deliberately
Name the glue work.
Distribute it fairly.
Connect it to measurable outcomes.
Check whether it advances the person’s chosen path.
Why it matters now
AI makes individual production easier to count while coordination remains hard to see. Leaders need better ways to recognize the people who improve the whole team without turning them into permanent human middleware.
Continue with the original
This short version preserves the main argument. Follow the source for the complete talk, article, or book.