Who Is Holding Your Organization Together?
A few years ago, I worked with someone I'll call Jane.
She always seemed to have the whole department in her head.
She knew what had been agreed.
Who was waiting for what.
Why something wouldn't work.
Every time she went on leave, she worked overtime beforehand so nothing would fall apart. And when she came back, she worked overtime again to catch everything she had missed.
The strange thing was that Jane wasn't the head of the department. She wasn't making the big strategic decisions.
She wasn't well paid.
In reality, she carried the most responsibility.
But had the least authority.
She held the department together.
She was seen as an administrator.
She reduced everyone else's stress.
She significantly increased her own.
In the previous blog post, I wrote about how organizations unwittingly teach people what is possible through their environment.
This week, I want to talk about the people who step in when that environment isn't supporting the work.
Looking back almost ten years later, I think of Jane as the glue in her department.
She wasn't just doing her job.
She was compensating for a system that couldn't reliably hold itself together.
Many leaders—and many women in particular—find themselves in this role at some point.
Not because someone openly asks them to.
But because the gaps gradually find them.
They become the people reconnecting conversations, smoothing over the friction, catching the work that keeps slipping through the cracks.
The irony is that the better they become at holding everything together, the more the organization starts depending on them to keep doing it.
And that comes at a cost.
Not just for the person being the glue.
But for the organization that slowly forgets how to hold itself together.
Let’s unpack this dynamic together.
When Work Stops Carrying Itself
When people operate in an environment that supports trust, ownership, initiative, learning, and honest communication, work begins to carry itself.
People take initiative. → Others build on it.→ Momentum compounds.
But when continuity is weak, the opposite happens.
The system stops carrying the work.
The people start carrying the system in addition to their work.
Because someone has to bridge the gaps between conversations, priorities, decisions, and people that no longer connect by themselves.
That is why I call that person "the glue."
Glue is almost invisible, it has no shape of its own.
It fills the spaces between separate pieces so they can function as one.
Over time, that is exactly what these people end up doing for the organization.
And like glue, the better they do their job, the less anyone notices they're there.
The role doesn't matter.
Sometimes it's an administrator.
Sometimes it's the leader.
Often, it is a woman.
What they all have in common is that they are carrying far more coordination, continuity, and emotional labour than their job description suggests.
Jane, for example, wasn't hired to hold the department together. She was hired to do her own job.
But over time, doing her job became impossible without first compensating for everything the system wasn't carrying.
When Helping Becomes Compensating
Let's be clear: no organization or system is ever perfect. Helping each other is deeply human and is one of the reasons teams outperform individuals.
Stepping in occasionally isn't the problem. That's simply teamwork.
The problem begins when helping stops being occasional and becomes an unofficial part of your role, because research refers to many of these helpful contributions as non-promotable work*.
Things like :
Remembering birthdays.
Following up on forgotten promises.
Keeping the project moving after the meeting.
Introducing two people who should probably be talking.
Quietly checking whether everyone understood the decision.
These activities are critical because they preserve continuity - the ability of work to keep moving after the initial effort. (If you're interested in continuity, I explored it in more detail in a previous blog here. )
These activities are less like a growth engine and more like an insurance policy. And that is exactly why they were never meant to become the operating model.
But when a system repeatedly fails to carry its own weight, it starts depending on someone to keep it moving.
This is when:
→Helping becomes compensating.
→The temporary becomes permanent.
→The exception becomes the expectation.
And expectations settle wherever they can hold.
For leaders, that expectation usually comes through accountability.
They have targets to deliver, so when the system struggles, they are expected to compensate.
For many women, the expectation is often less explicit. It is social rather than formal.
Research suggests that women are more likely to be asked to coordinate, be expected to help and eventually become the person the team relies on whenever something starts to slip.*
Different pressures.
Same role in the system.
Over time, the person carrying the work can become so central to the team's functioning that people stop distinguishing between the individual and the system itself. So when the glue person steps away, it no longer feels as though a person is absent.
It feels as though the system has failed.
"Why wasn't this done?"
"Why didn't anyone follow up?"
"How did we miss this?"
Remenber Jane?
She wasn't the problem.
She was the workaround.
The trouble was that maintaining the workaround became easier than fixing the system.
And as long as Jane kept holding everything together, the system never had to learn how to hold itself together.
The Cost of the Glue
The cost of being the glue is threefold.
First, for the person.
Jane spent most of her time doing non-promotable work.
She also earned around 30% less than her colleagues and had to fight for every small additionnal increase.
Five years into the role, Jane was starting to burn out.
Because no person was ever meant to function as infrastructure.
Eventually, even strong people reach their limit.
Second, for the team.
If your team needs a glue person, you also have a bottleneck.
Every decision.
Every handover.
Every forgotten detail.
Eventually finds its way back to the same person.
At first, this feels efficient. Over time, it creates dependency.
Because the more a team depends on one person's ability to hold everything together, the fewer opportunities everyone else has to learn how to make things work. So collective capability stops growing.
And eventually, the glue person's capacity becomes the team's capacity.
If they can carry five projects, the team carries five.
If they become overwhelmed, the team slows with them.
Like a chain, the system can only move as fast as its weakest point.
And if the glue person is the leader, the cost becomes even greater. Instead of creating the conditions for the team to think, decide, and move without them, their attention is consumed by keeping today's work connected.
They are no longer shaping the system.
They are reacting to it.
They haven't lost the ability to lead.
They've lost the capacity to.
The person trying to prevent the floor from giving in actually becomes the ceiling of what the team can achieve.
Finally, for the organization.
Every organization is constantly teaching people how to succeed within it.
Not through the values on the wall but through what people experience every day.
When leaders spend their time compensating for the system, the field begins to teach a survival curriculum.
That progress depends on extraordinary effort.
That someone else will eventually have to catch what got dropped.
That keeping things afloat matters more than improving them.
That the goal is to cope, not to create.
Little by little, survival becomes more familiar than possibility.
The organization's energy shifts from building a better future to preserving a present that isn't serving it.
So, people adapt. They stop experimenting, become more cautious, lower their expectations of what is possible here.
Or simply leave.
Because the environment has taught them that there isn't much room for curiosity, creativity, initiative, or leadership to survive.
And when those behaviours no longer feel safe or worthwhile, it is irrelevant whether or not they are listed in the handbook.
The field of possibility begins to shrink, one adaptation at a time.
Until what was once a temporary workaround quietly became the culture itself.
CLosing
Momentum was never meant to be carried by extraordinary people.
It was meant to emerge from ordinary people working in a system that supports them.
If your organization depends on glue people, the answer isn't finding stronger glue.
It's creating conditions where the work can begin carrying itself again.
This rarely happens through one grand transformation.
It happens one conversation at a time.
One improved meeting.
One clarified expectation.
One new signal.
Because when enough of those signals begin to change, the field changes with them.
That is where momentum begins again.
*Babcock, L., Recalde, M. P., Vesterlund, L., & Weingart, L. (2017). Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability. American Economic Review, 107(3), 714–747.
**Linda Babcock et al., The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work (2022).
