Glue Work
I have made a career from doing glue work. I loved it. Bringing people together, caring about the customer journey, facilitating planning and retrospectives, crafting user stories and the like. It really makes you stand out, you look like an all-action, get-things-done type of person, everyone wants you on the team. I have a great career, talks, books, workshops, courses, great roles, both as a consultant and staff member. Bearded and well respected.
However, I now have a problem with glue work. I have come to think, no matter how much glue work I’ve done, has it really made the teams work better? Or has it just created a dependency and allowed other undesirable behaviours to continue. As I have learned more about systems thinking and organisation design, the glue work problem has been harder to ignore.
- Glue work vs excessive glue work – lets deal with this. I’m not advocating for no glue work, as I’ve done rather well from it. That would be silly, as all teams need everyone doing glue work, the best teams all contribute to glue work. Like most things in life, an excess of a thing, starts to cause a problem. Especially when a team comes to rely on an individual for it, and the individual feels they can’t stop, or everything will stop.
- Glueing together broken systems – if you as a tester, are doing excessive glue work, are you covering for organisational failings and basically maintaining the status quo? Take organisations who have teams that consist of back end and front end developers. You know the story, the back end work was done ages ago, the front end are just getting to it now. Guess what, the back end doesn’t quite do what the front end needs it to do. A further guess what manifests itself in needing lots of retrospective glue work (which is the worst kind of glue work) in order to make it all work together. If you take on this glue work in your desire to not see the team fail, are you truly doing best by the team and the organisation?
- Leaving a glue void – by doing glue work, what work are you not doing? This coaching question was posed to me on a particularly chaotic project a few years ago. I was so busy solving problems, fighting fires and bringing people together that the testing that the team needed wasn’t getting done. I would hear myself saying how important testing was and then set off doing anything but testing in my quest to glue the team together. If you are glueing you are very likely not doing whatever it is you are there to do. In my case it was testing. This question actually made me question my approach to glue work a great deal, from then on I seriously questioned whether or not I should be glueing quite so many bits of the team together.
- Promotion without pay – Excessive glue work can result in promotions without a pay rise as you are already doing the job. Or you have to wait for the promised pay rise until some undisclosed time. Disingenuous management loves people who do lots of glue work without being asked. They get all the benefits and very few of the drawbacks. A bunch of testers start acting like Scrum Masters as well. Very nice thank you, saved me a role. Eventually, once you wise up and say ‘hang on a minute’, they offer you the next job on the ladder, but with no extra money. You don’t have to already be doing the next job to get the next job, that’s what exploiters of glue workers say.
- Culturally enforced glue work – Glue work is often delegated to those expected to do it, women and junior engineers for example. The team coffee gathering, the Christmas party, remembering to invite the whole team to meetings, leaving cards, maternity and paternity gifts. Be honest, who is doing that on your team? I’ve been guilty of this assumption in the past, to my shame.
- With seniority comes real glue work – having said all of the above, when should glue work become a more prominent part of your role? As in, a lot of what you do is glue work and for good reasons. To me, once you take the mantle of Lead/Staff/Principal/Head Of X, then you need to be a glue worker. Whatever changes you wish to see in your organisation is going to need some glue and a lot of it. Often the glue will need reapplying as well, as everything can and will change. If you are trying to influence a wider organisation, you can’t do it with role power alone, you will need the glue of relationships and knowledge as well. Once you glue together (not literally) two people on different teams trying to solve a similar problem, you’ll know what I mean.
If you are just starting out, by all means get involved with some glue work. It’ll do you, your team and your career some good. If you get the feeling that glue work is expected of you, or that now you are the glue, then it’s time to question where your priorities lie. Glue doesn’t last forever, eventually it all comes unstuck. Make sure you work on your career foundations, rather than just the adhesive.