Glue employees don’t take the spotlight but they’re as valuable to employers as star performers

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. xxxxxxxxxx So a glue-employee is one who gets the best out of a team. But here’s the catch.

In a fiercely competitive workplace, where top performers are rewarded while the rest are relegated to the ‘better luck next time’ bucket, the glue-player often gets shuffled in with the rest. This can be a big mistake by managers who rose via the ‘high performance at any cost’ route and have had little training or inclination to appreciate someone who did not take this fast track. I recalled a former colleague who fit the mould of a glue-player as if it were made for him.

A good performer and dependable colleague, he helped many of us out of professional ruts that came more frequently than we had expected. At the end of many an event, he was mentioned in appreciation emails from bosses, an acknowledgement he invariably shrugged off. Never the best, but always the one who stitched together pending work when others slacked off.

In the end, the team won. The business won. The slackers went unnoticed.

The top performer mopped up some credit. And the glue-employee quietly faded into the background. I thought of other glue-employees that I may have known, and I realized that whenever I have been pushed against the wall because of a work deadline, the team’s best performers did not always help out.

My slips would have never impacted their career trajectory, so why bother? But there were a few who volunteered help. They thrashed out the work with me, stayed late, checked after submission and brought out a few chuckles with anecdotes of past slip-ups on their part. Was I grateful to them? Of course.