Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Glue work
The coordinating, documenting and unblocking work that holds a team together and rarely shows up in the artifacts a promotion process values. The people who do it tend not to be promoted for it.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-5Career development and growth pathsOne-on-ones, promotions, the Staff+ track, and the IC/manager choice.
- CC-3Inclusive practices and equitable opportunity distributionWho gets the stretch work, the visibility, and the benefit of the doubt.
Related terms
- Affinity bias
- Favouring people who resemble oneself in evaluation.
- Calibration
- Aligning evaluation standards across interviewers, managers or organisations so that the same capability or performance earns the same judgment.
- Default gradient
- The tilt of a distributed organisation toward wherever its decision-makers sit.
- Disengagement signals
- Withdrawal, cynicism and ideas that stop coming.
- Growth ladder
- An explicit description of what each level looks like for each competency, so that a promotion is judged against a shared description rather than against how assertive a manager is.
- Key-person risk
- Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted.
- Location-neutral
- Decision-making and information flows designed so that a team four time zones away has the same access as one down the corridor.
- Managerial leverage
- Grove's framing that a manager's output is the output of the organisation under them, and that activities differ in how much output they produce per hour spent.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Glue work. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.glue-work). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/glue-work