What’s glue got to do with it?

A lot if you want to hold together high-performing teams. While glue is generally considered an adhesive for repairing broken treasures, creating crafts, and providing children’s art classes with hours of engagement and enjoyment, glue now plays a new role. It’s also an adjective describing employees who quietly hold everything together on a team. Glue employees help strong teams coalesce and become even better. Glue employees tend to have high emotional intelligence, relational influence, and connector tendencies.

According to Jon Levy, author of the new book Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius, glue players are the key ingredient of successful teams. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, he explained that glue employees may be more valuable to high performing teams than their star talent. (Check out “The Underrated Power of ‘Glue Employees’ Who Hold Everything Together.” Glue players build team cohesion as well as multiply others’ results. Their “glue work” doesn’t replace the need for star talent or highly technical skills; instead, the contributions by glue employees are complementary and additive.

So who exactly are these glue employees and what specifically do they do? Be aware that they may be hiding in plain sight. Glue employees generally prefer to stay under the radar. They work behind the scenes, making things happen by coordinating with team members and with other departments and functions, quietly mentoring, and taking on the unglamorous but critical tasks. They’re motivated by progress, not attention.

For instance, glue employees often notice unmet needs and jump in to meet them. They’ll smooth conflicts. Take on or reassign forgotten tasks. Follow up. Figure out how to handle duplication or misalignment. Bolster psychological safety to mitigate against more problems. Be calm and help employees regulate their nervous systems. Build trust.

These tasks may not be explicitly stated on their job descriptions; however, glue employees are basically providing the connective adhesive to improve relationships and execute tasks more reliably and consistently. With complexity and uncertainty swirling all around, they serve as an anchor. They help everyone stick together, support each other, and focus on what’s important.

How can you spot current glue employees as well as those with potential? You can ask these questions to surface valuable actions associated with high-performing glue employees. These behaviors include relational influence, emotional intelligence, and connective behaviors, the invisible glue that holds teams together.

1. Who helps you (or your team) succeed behind the scenes, even if they’re not officially in charge?
2. When tensions rise, who do people trust to step in, smooth things over, and keep people talking and working productively?
3. Who naturally connects people across departments, functions and other boundaries so workflows keep moving smoothly without stalling or sputtering?
4. Who notices when others are struggling and offers help without being asked and without calling attention to themselves?
5. If this person left tomorrow, whose absence would make collaboration noticeably harder and would cause morale to drop?
6. Who ensures that follow-up and follow through actually happen – coordinating details and keeping everyone aligned?
7. Who lives and then models your organization’s values through everyday interactions without tooting their own horn?
8. Who has both a calming as well as energizing effect on the team with their presence or attitude?
9. Who often takes on the unglamorous or “extra” work just because it benefits the team and keeps things moving?
10. Whose contributions tend to be recognized in thank-you’s and informal comments rather than in formal performance metrics and performance reviews?

Glue employees define what it means to be relational leaders without the title. They model presence, relational impact, and influence without formal authority. Because they’re working behind the scenes, they can often get overlooked, which can create another set of challenges.

For instance, while successful teams may depend on these quiet relational leaders, they’re humans who need support of their own. For example, it’s easy to find them falling into these gaps and getting overlooked:

• Invisible workspace: Because glue work is relational, process-oriented, coordination heavy, and often hidden, glue employees may not get noticed because they’re not hitting the typical “output” metrics that many companies desire, such as sales volume and project deliverables shipped.
• Recognition gap:Without special metrics for “team stabilizer,” the glue workers may not receive the recognition that the “star performers” achieve for hitting or exceeding their impressive targets.
• Hiring and development bias: Organizations often are more interested in finding “high potentials” with strong visible achievements and disregard those whose strengths are relational, connective, and supportive. Glue workers may have to advocate for themselves to get the appropriate development for their role, which may not be their style.
• Risks of burnout and undervaluation: Glue employees can experience fatigue or feel invisible, which becomes a retention risk, if they don’t receive the formal acknowledgement and recognition for their relational labor. After all, smoothing conflicts, linking silos, and mentoring can be demanding work.

To support glue workers along with other team members, leaders need to make an effort to identify, develop, reward and recognize these workhorses. After all, glue workers can be key to the success of the leader as well as the team.

In his new book, Levy points out the paradox of success: focusing on creating teams that operate well and hit or exceed their performance targets is what makes a high-impact leader. But focusing purely on the leader does almost nothing for the team’s performance.

Go find and check on your glue workers!