Some nights the tones drop for a lift assist. Someone has fallen and can’t get up. No injury, no transport. You show up, you help them off the floor, you leave.
Early in my time as a volunteer, I ran one of these with a partner who had years on me. We helped the woman back into her chair — she was eighty-four, and the whole thing took ninety seconds — and I reached for the laptop to get her refusal signature and go. He stopped me. Vitals.
Her blood pressure was low. A new medication, it turned out. She’d fallen twice that month and told no one. There were bunched rugs in her path, a phone two rooms away, a chair she had to climb half out of to reach her cane. The fall was the visible event. Everything that caused it was invisible — and more important than the fall.
Driving back, my partner said the line I keep coming back to: The lift isn’t the call. The lift is what you think the call is. The call is everything else.
Every team has lift assists. Except in the office, it is the work everyone benefits from and no one gets credit for. The engineer who keeps the deploy pipeline alive. The PM running the cross-team sync nobody assigned. The designer maintaining the system so everyone else’s work doesn’t drift.
Tanya Reilly named this in her talk Being Glue: the less glamorous, less-promotable work that’s necessary to make a team succeed. And here’s her warning, which is the trap — doing too much of it, too early, can quietly stall a career or end one. Promo packets reward shipped projects. Reviews reward the quarter’s deliverables. None of them have a column for the reason five shipped things didn’t fall apart on contact with each other. So the work that makes someone most valuable is the work the system is built not to see.
Like the fall, glue work is a signal. The patch is visible; the question is why the process keeps breaking. The unsanctioned sync is visible; the question is why the sanctioned channels aren’t carrying it. See only the visible event and you’ll under-resource the cause — and the work keeps getting done by the same person, in the margins, until they leave. Then three things break and you say we didn’t realize how much they did. That sentence is a chart that reads “patient assisted to chair, refused transport.” It’s the documentation of a call you didn’t actually run.
You won’t fix this at the system level by being a thoughtful manager — the system isn’t built to see it. What you can do is run a secondary assessment on the glue work in front of you: read what it tells you about the team, find the gap it’s patching, and make it visible where it counts — in the review, in your updates upward, with names and specifics. You may not make the system reward it. You can be the witness.
This week: who’s running the lift assists on your team? And when did you last name what they actually do — out loud, with specifics, in a room where it counts?
— David
With credit to Tanya Reilly, whose talk “Being Glue” is worth your time: noidea.dog/glue