Great Glue People Make Themselves Unnecessary

Being the glue is a genuine strength. The most sophisticated thing you can do with it is turn it into something the company keeps after you're gone.

Every scaling company has one: the person who holds up the walls and the ceiling, who makes sure the right thing happens whether or not it's in their job description. We call them the glue - and lately, rightly, we've started celebrating them. Molly Graham built a whole community around it; "glue person" has gone from a shrug to a title people are proud to claim. I've been that person, and I'll defend the label.

And there's still a version of this story that goes sideways - not because being glue is a weakness, but because it's such a strength that it's easy to get stuck there.

When one person becomes the operating system

Here's what glue quietly becomes if no one is paying attention. The knowledge lives in your head. The decisions route through your inbox. The reason that odd workflow exists is a thing only you remember. Without anyone designing it this way, you've become the company's operating system - the thing everything else runs on.

That's a testament to how much you carry. It's also a fragile place for a company to be. An operating system made of a single human being has failure modes that have nothing to do with how good that human is: you can't take a real vacation because the questions don't stop, work stalls the day you're out, and the bus factor is one. The day the glue person leaves, everyone learns exactly how much of the company lived in their memory - almost always more than anyone guessed.

None of that is a knock on the glue person. It's what happens when an organization leans on a person instead of building the thing the person has been standing in for.

The most advanced form of glue is structure

So the highest-leverage move isn't to hold everything together forever. It's to make the glue set - to take what's trapped in your head and push it out into the organization, into documentation, training, defaults, and shared habits, until the company depends less on any single person, including you.

Molly Graham calls a version of this "giving away your Legos": as the company grows, you hand off the pieces of your job so the whole thing can scale past you. Same instinct here. The glue person's second act is turning glue into infrastructure.

It takes a specific kind of confidence, because indispensability is comfortable - it feels like job security. Building the thing that makes you dispensable feels, at first, like giving away your own value. It isn't. Anyone can become a bottleneck. Very few people can look at the chaos they're personally absorbing and calmly convert it into something the company owns. That second thing is the rare skill, and it's the one worth being known for.

Why companies don't see it until it's a crisis

There's a reason this work stays invisible: it doesn't belong to any department.

Every scaling company generates a category of work that has no home. Onboarding that's suddenly too important to improvise. Knowledge that needs to outlive the conversation it happened in. Manager enablement, quality systems, internal communications, the change management of a company growing up. None of it is cleanly HR, or Operations, or Customer Success, or Product - so it never gets assigned. It accretes onto whoever is capable and nearby. Onto the glue.

I once tried to name this directly - I wrote a proposal for a role that gathered all these scattered responsibilities into a single, deliberate function. The company didn't take it. And that's the tell, not a footnote to it: an organization couldn't recognize a category of work it fully depended on, even with a written definition on the table. The work was load-bearing and unnamed at the same time. Underneath all of it is the same quiet problem - organizations forget. They forget why a process exists, what Legal already answered, what a manager did last time that worked. They forget because the knowledge lives in people instead of in the company itself. Which is exactly the gap a great glue person spends their days closing.

AI raises the stakes; it doesn't solve them

It's tempting to think this is about to be automated away. AI can summarize the meeting, generate the doc, and search ten thousand pages of institutional knowledge in seconds. It can answer the questions that used to require finding the one person who "just knew."

But AI doesn't decide what's worth remembering. It doesn't notice where learning is breaking down. It doesn't build a culture where people share what they've learned instead of quietly reinventing it. Those are organizational design problems - glue-person problems - and they're getting more important, not less. A better search engine on top of a company that never learned how to remember just helps you retrieve the wrong institutional memory faster.

What to do with this

If you lead a scaling company: go find your glue person - the one whose calendar makes no sense - and ask what breaks if they leave. Then treat the answer as a roadmap. Don't just thank them for holding it together; give the work a name, and fund the infrastructure that turns their heroics into something the company keeps. The tell you're looking for is the work you can't slot into an org chart. It's usually the work everything else rests on.

And if you're the glue: your value is real - everyone leaning on you is not in your imagination. Your next level isn't holding more; it's building what you hold into something that outlasts you. Make the glue set. That's not the end of your value; it's the most advanced version of it.

The best glue people don't hold the company together forever. They build a company that no longer needs holding - and then they go do it again somewhere new.