The work that keeps everything running doesn't show up in your review.
What the metrics don't count · #1
If you're the person everyone pings when something needs doing, this one's for you.
Take notes. Onboard the new hire. Find the doc. Chase legal. Clean up the slides. Figure out who owns the thing nobody owns. None of it is on your goals, and all of it is somehow yours.
It has a name
Tanya Reilly calls it glue work, in a talk called "Being Glue". It's the work that makes a team successful but doesn't show up as a deliverable: onboarding people, noticing the gap between two teams, keeping the docs current, unblocking everyone else.
Teams fall apart without it. Promotion packets mostly ignore it.
Why it doesn't get you promoted
Promotions get built on things people can point at: projects shipped, tickets closed, numbers that moved. Glue work is what makes those things possible, but it rarely gets a line of its own.
And it doesn't land evenly. The research behind the book The No Club found that women are asked to take on this kind of "non-promotable" work more often than men, and say yes more often.
The version nobody talks about
Most glue-work advice is about tasks that aren't your job. There's another kind: the invisible part of the job you actually have.
Incident management was my job. You could see every incident I closed. You couldn't see how hard each one was, or all the times I jumped in to help a teammate with theirs, like taking over the status page updates so they could stay focused on the fix. None of that showed up anywhere.
How to make it count (without doing less of it)
- Keep a glue log. Once a week, write down what you did that isn't in a ticket: who you unblocked, what you covered, what didn't break because you were there. My free brag doc has a column just for glue work.
- Put a number on it. "Covered comms on six incidents this month" lands harder than "helped out a lot."
- Say what would have happened without it. For example: the status page stayed current, so support wasn't flooded with "is it down?" tickets.
- Bring it to your 1:1. Ask your manager directly: "What would get this counted in my review?" My free 1:1 template has a spot for exactly this.
- If you manage a team, rotate it. Notice who always says yes, share the glue around, and give credit out loud.
What's the glue work nobody sees in your job? Tell me →