Manage Glue Workers

Managing Glue Workers

Coaching, protecting, and developing engineers who consistently take on or are assigned glue work — the essential coordination, documentation, unblocking, and process improvement tasks that keep teams running but are often invisible and non-promotable in traditional engineering ladders.

This skill is for managers of glue-heavy ICs who need to:

• Prevent burnout from endless support requests
• Ensure glue work counts toward promotion
• Balance team workload without dropping critical glue functions
• Develop the engineer's core technical skills alongside their multiplier skills
• Advocate effectively in promotion cycles against "not technical enough" bias

Key premise (from Tanya Reilly): Glue work is technical leadership. The problem isn't the work; it's that many organizations don't recognize it as such. This skill helps managers fix that mismatch — either by making the glue visible and promotable, or by strategically reducing it so the engineer can build different skills.

When to apply

Trigger this skill when:

• A report is doing 30%+ glue work and their promotion is stalled.
• A report complains they're "just the helper" and never get to work on their own projects.
• Noticing a pattern: one person always mentors new hires, always updates the roadmap, always coordinates cross-team work.
• A glue-heavy engineer is showing burnout signs (exhaustion, cynicism, reduced coding time).
• Preparing for a promotion packet for a glue-heavy report and needing to frame their impact correctly.
• The user says: "Everyone says my report is great, but they didn't promote — said not technical enough."

Skip when:

• The engineer wants to transition to management/TPM (that's a role-change conversation; use report-career-architect for growth planning).
• The glue work is genuinely non-essential (busywork) — first run glue-audit to validate it's load-bearing.
• The team is failing deliveries and needs everyone on core work temporarily (but re-evaluate later).

Prerequisites

First, run glue-audit on the report's workload (the skill can do this for a single person). You need an itemized list of glue tasks with time estimates before you can manage it.

The diagnostic questions

The skill interviews the manager on:

1. The report's work profile

• "What does [name] typically do in a week? Rough time breakdown: coding, meetings, glue tasks, other?"
• "What are their 2–3 biggest accomplishments this quarter?"
• "Which of those were glue-mediated vs solo?"
• "What would break first if they went on vacation for two weeks?"

2. Career goals & ladder

• "What level are they targeting? What does our ladder say at that level about leadership/impact?"
• "Do they want to stay IC, or are they considering management/TPM?"
• "What's the gap between what they're doing and what the ladder values?"

3. Credit & visibility

• "Who knows the glue work they do? (You? Their peers? Their manager's manager?)"
• "How do they talk about their impact in self-reviews? Do they frame it as 'helping' or 'leading'?"
• "When you advocate for them in calibration, how do you describe their contribution?"

4. Team dependency & burnout signals

• "Have they mentioned feeling overwhelmed, or that they can't focus on coding?"
• "Are they the go-to person for everything? Do people interrupt them constantly?"
• "What happens when they say no? Do others pick up the task, or does it drop?"

5. Skill development desires

• "What skills do they want to grow? (Systems design? Project management? People leadership?)"
• "Does their current glue work develop those skills, or crowd them out?"

Manager actions: before promotion season

1. Credit amplification

• Public attribution: In team meetings, retell glue wins as technical leadership: "Alice's design review caught a critical API inconsistency — that saved us from a rework that would have taken 2 weeks."
• Document the artifacts: Ensure the report saves evidence (meeting notes, design comments, Slack threads) in a shared folder or their wins log.
• Coach their narrative: Work with the report to rewrite "I helped onboard Bob" → "I designed and executed an onboarding flow that reduced Bob's time to first PR from 14 days to 6."

2. Workload rebalancing

• Rotate glue explicitly. Don't let glue default to the same person. Create a shared ownership model with rotations.
• Protected time. Block "core work" hours on the report's calendar; auto-defer non-urgent requests.
• Delegate the glue. Have the report train others on their glue tasks; gradually transfer ownership.
• Say no for them. When a non-essential glue request comes in, the manager intercepts: "That's not on [name]'s priority list this quarter — can [other person] take it?"

Caution: Don't remove all glue. Some engineers enjoy it and need it for satisfaction. The goal is balanced glue, not elimination.

3. Before the promotion packet

• Run promo-case-glue together. Review the draft, pressure-test each framing.
• Fill the ladder gaps. If the ladder says "writes production code" and the report hasn't, plan a small visible core project that can be completed pre-promotion (with glue temporarily reduced).
• Get senior advocate. Ensure the report's director+ understands their impact; provide a pre-brief with talking points.

4. If the promotion fails

• Ask for specifics: "What concrete evidence would have convinced you?"
• Re-run the equity audit: Was there bias in the committee's interpretation?
• Consider the cynical solution (Tanya Reilly): If the org truly won't promote glue-heavy ICs, the engineer may need to temporarily reduce glue and do a clearly technical project — even if it's not the best use of their skills — to "check the box."
• Exit consideration: If the org won't budge and the engineer's skills are glue-oriented, a TPM or EM role (internal or external) may be a better fit.

Coaching the glue-heavy engineer

1. Help them see glue as leadership, not service

Reframe their self-description from "I help people" to "I enable team velocity through coordination and system improvement."

2. Artifact habit

Teach them to save evidence automatically:

• Copy insightful design-review comments to a design-reviews/ folder
• Archive onboarding docs with timestamps
• Screenshot Slack threads where they unblocked someone (with permission)

3. Strategic volunteering

Coach: "Volunteer for glue that's high-visibility and aligned with your growth goals. Say no to glue that's invisible and doesn't develop you."

4. Negotiation language for incoming requests

Practice: "I can't take that on this sprint — my priority is [core project]. Can [name] handle it?" or "I can mentor, but only for 1 hour/week; here's the onboarding doc for self-service."

5. Calendar as shield

Block out "focus time" and "project work" as recurring events. Treat them as unbreakable meetings.

6. Skill expansion plan

Ensure they're doing some core technical work regularly — even if small — to maintain and demonstrate technical fluency:

• Pair on a tricky bug once a week
• Own a small service or script
• Lead a design for a narrow scoped feature

If the team needs the glue but the org doesn't value it

The system problem: The team would collapse without this person's glue, but promotion criteria ignore glue. Manager options:

1. Ladder advocacy: Propose ladder language change: "Senior ICs demonstrate impact through code AND by multiplying team effectiveness through mentorship, design review, and process improvement."
2. Title change: Could the person become Tech Lead or Principal IC with explicit glue mandate? A title gives license to do glue without penalty.
3. Create a hybrid IC-TPM role: If the person loves coordination, formalize it with a title that recognizes that work.
4. Protect and pay anyway: If the person is happy and the team needs them, keep them in the role and adjust comp appropriately, even if formal promotion stalls (temporary measure only — they'll eventually leave if stuck).

Operating principles

• Believe the report. If they say the work isn't counted, assume it's true until proven otherwise.
• Make glue work visible. That's 80% of the solution — if the committee can't see it, they won't value it.
• Balance team needs with report's career. The team's glue dependency is a red flag; distribute it, don't just celebrate it.
• Don't confuse "good at glue" with "should be manager." Many glue-workers prefer IC track; don't push them to EM just because they're good at coordination.
• Protect learning time. Ensure they have space to deepen technical skills if they want to grow as an IC.
• Bias interrupt. If you catch yourself asking a woman/junior person to take notes or organize the offsite, pause and ask someone else.

Composition with other skills

• glue-audit — run first to establish baseline
• promo-case-glue — run with the report to co-create their narrative
• workload-equity — if multiple reports do glue, run team-level audit
• report-career-architect — if the report wants to stay IC but grow, this skill designs the growth plan
• coaching-mode — helps the manager ask, not tell, when coaching the report through their choices

Anti-patterns to flag

• Manager taking credit. "My team's glue success is because I hired well." No, the report did the day-to-day glue; name them.
• Overloading the glue person. "Let's just have Alice do it, she's good at that." This is exploitation, not development.
• Pigeonholing. "You're the documentation person now." That's a career dead-end unless it's formally recognized.
• Ignoring burnout signals. Glue work is endless; without boundaries it consumes all time.
• "We'll recognize it next cycle." Promises without evidence. The current cycle's work must count.
• Confusing glue with low-value work. Good glue is high-impact system work; don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.