Every team has one. The person who notices that two departments are building towards completely different outcomes and quietly sorts it out before anyone else even realises there’s a problem. The person who onboards the new joiner properly, not just with a laptop and a login, but with the context they actually need. The person who knows that Karen on the third floor can fix the compliance query that’s been holding things up for a fortnight.
In 2019, a software engineer called Tanya Reilly gave this kind of work a name: glue work. She described it as the relationship-building, the coordination, the filling of organisational cracks that holds projects and teams together. It was, she argued, vitally important and chronically undervalued.
Her argument resonated because it was obviously true. Glue work kept things moving, but it rarely showed up in performance reviews. The people who did it well, often more junior team members who simply happened to be good at it, found themselves penalised for spending less time on the “real” work. In software engineering, the real work was writing code. Everything else was background noise.
Reilly put it bluntly: “Doing glue work too early can be career limiting, or even push people out of the industry.” The irony was painful. Organisations were losing talented people precisely because those people were also talented at the things nobody bothered to measure.
There is a gender dimension to this that deserves attention. Research consistently shows that women are more likely than men to volunteer for, or be volunteered for, non-promotable work. In 2022, four academics, Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart, published “The No Club,” a book documenting this phenomenon across industries from engineering to investment banking. At one professional services firm they studied, women spent 200 more hours per year than men on these tasks. That is an entire month of unrewarded labour, every year.
The conventional wisdom, understandably, was to protect yourself. Say no. Focus on the work that gets rewarded. Keep your head down and ship the thing that shows up on the scorecard.
And then AI arrived.
Something interesting is happening in the technology sector right now. The “core” technical skill that was always most rewarded, writing code, is increasingly being done by machines. AI coding assistants and agents can generate, debug, and refactor code at a pace no human can match. The engineers who built their entire professional identity around the craft of writing elegant, efficient code are finding that particular skill worth less than it was two years ago.
What remains? The ability to understand what the customer actually needs. The ability to set context for AI agents so they produce something useful rather than something technically correct but functionally useless. The ability to coordinate across teams, spot misalignments early, and make sure the right people are talking to each other. The ability to see the bigger picture.
In other words, glue work.
Brittany Ellich, a staff engineer at GitHub, has been writing and speaking about this shift. The skills that were once considered peripheral, the coordination, the documentation, the stakeholder management, are now the skills. The people who were always good at them are finding the transition to AI-assisted work easier than their colleagues who defined themselves purely through technical output.
This should give every leader pause, not just in technology but across professional services and financial services too.
Think about your own organisation. Who is the person that makes the quarterly board pack actually make sense, not by producing the numbers but by understanding what story they need to tell? Who is the adviser that other advisers go to when they need help navigating a tricky client situation? Who is the person that new starters gravitate towards because they explain things clearly and make people feel welcome?
Now ask yourself: how are those people being rewarded? Are they being promoted? Are they being recognised in any formal way at all? Or are they being quietly taken for granted while the people who hit their individual production targets, regardless of how much support they needed from others to do it, climb the ladder ahead of them?
The mortgage industry is as guilty of this as anywhere. We tend to reward volume. Cases placed, revenue generated, targets hit. Those things matter, obviously. But the broker who mentors three junior advisers and helps them become competent faster, the compliance manager who builds relationships with lenders that smooth out processing delays, the operations person who redesigns a workflow and saves the whole team four hours a week, these contributions rarely show up on a league table.
Consumer Duty has started to push firms towards thinking more holistically about outcomes, about whether the whole system is working for clients rather than just whether individual advisers are hitting their numbers. That is a step in the right direction. But it will only go so far if the people doing the work that makes good outcomes possible remain invisible in how firms measure and reward performance.
AI is going to accelerate this reckoning. As more of the routine, technical, and process-driven work gets automated, what will differentiate firms is the quality of their coordination, their culture, their ability to understand context and respond to it intelligently. The glue.
Reilly’s original point was that glue work was expected at senior levels but risky at junior levels. The implication was that you had to earn the right to do it by first proving yourself on the “real” work. Perhaps that was always a flawed model. Perhaps the real cost was all the talented people who left because they were good at the wrong things at the wrong time.
The question for any leader now is whether you can spot glue work happening in your organisation, and whether you have the honesty to admit that you have probably been undervaluing it for years.
Source: Sarah O’Connor, “Glue work,” Financial Times, April 2026. Tanya Reilly’s original talk and post: noidea.dog/glue