Every team has that person who connects the dots, keeps projects moving, and quietly helps others succeed. They make sure the right people talk to each other, follow up after meetings, share notes, and bridge gaps between systems or departments. You might recognise someone like that in your organisation. You might even be that person yourself.
This kind of work often sits at the heart of transformation. It’s the invisible effort that helps teams deliver, sometimes known as glue work.
Coined by software engineer and author Tanya Reilly in her influential talk Being Glue (2017), the term describes the often unseen work that holds teams together: coordinating, communicating, and problem-solving so others can do their jobs more effectively. As Reilly notes, glue work makes everyone else more effective.
Over time, the idea has expanded beyond software teams. Community builder Rosie Sherry, for instance, talked at Jisc’s recent Community Day in Bristol about how building and sustaining communities involves the same kind of glue work in connecting people, coordinating efforts, and working across disciplines.
Glue work in digital transformation is often the difference between good intentions and real progress. It’s the quiet effort that turns strategies into shared understanding, and shared understanding into action.
Glue work in HE and FE
In colleges and universities, glue work takes many forms. It might be a learning technologist or digital practitioner going beyond their job description to help academic staff translate curriculum goals into effective digital practice, or an administrator bridging the gap between IT systems and student needs. Within teams, the colleague who mentors others, shares practical solutions, and quietly holds things together when change makes everyday work feel uncertain is also doing glue work.
It becomes especially important when digital projects require input from across the organisation. Bringing together people from IT, teaching, and other departments often means balancing competing priorities, timelines, and perspectives. Progress relies on those who can translate between groups, build trust, and keep everyone aligned around a shared purpose.
These contributions are essential to digital transformation, yet they often go unrecognised because they don’t sit neatly within a single job role or performance target. For digital leaders, perhaps part of the challenge is finding ways to acknowledge and support this invisible work.
Recognising and supporting glue work
As we begin sharing outputs from our project exploring collaboration between IT, professional services, and teaching staff in FE, glue work feels like a useful lens. It highlights the informal, relational effort that enables systems and strategies to succeed.
When this kind of effort goes unrecognised, it can take its toll. Those who provide the glue often do so alongside their formal responsibilities, and without clear support it can become draining. For organisations, there’s also a risk: when undervalued people move on or burn out, they leave gaps that are difficult to fill.
Recognising glue work is important, but so too is creating the conditions that make it less necessary, where collaboration, communication and shared understanding are built into the system, not held together by individuals. For digital leaders the opportunity is to build cultures that value and sustain this invisible work while also addressing the gaps that make it indispensable.
Superglue image by Omegatron, Wikimedia Commons
Pritt Stick image from pxhere.com
