Why glue work in startups deserves a performance lens

In most early-stage startups, there’s someone who catches everything before it drops. They’re not necessarily the founder or the product lead, but somehow, they’re always the one who follows up after meetings. They remember the deadline that slipped through the cracks, clarify action items that were lost in discussion, and summarize team decisions so everyone—including remote teammates—stays on the same page. When you hit a wall, they’re the one fixing it without making noise. That’s glue work.

If you’re lucky, your team has someone doing it. If you’re even luckier, they’re not doing it alone. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most early teams confuse glue work with personality. They treat it like a nice-to-have. Or worse, a “female-coded” bonus trait. But glue work isn’t kindness. It’s infrastructure. And if you don’t treat it that way, your velocity will eventually collapse under its own weight.

The startup world loves clarity when it comes to code quality, financial runway, or customer churn. But when it comes to internal coordination—the subtle choreography of how teams actually get things done—most founders fly blind. That’s a problem. Because glue work is not optional. It’s not invisible. It’s just untracked. And untracked systems are the fastest way to scale fragility.

What makes glue work so insidious is that it presents like health. When it’s happening, things feel smooth. When it’s missing, it feels like a leadership gap, not a systems one. You won’t catch it in metrics. You’ll feel it in the friction. Deadlines drift. Communication gets noisy. Morale dips and nobody can explain why. Founders mistake the symptoms for stress, when the real cause is much simpler: someone stopped holding the pieces together, and no one realized they were doing it in the first place.

This is especially common in lean teams with flat hierarchies. Everyone’s a “builder,” nobody wants to manage, and the idea of structure feels like a betrayal of startup speed. So someone picks up the slack. They build clarity into Slack threads. They chase decisions that die in shared Notion docs. They remember that the design team didn’t see the new GTM timeline. They are, functionally, operations. But they don’t have the title, the authority, or the evaluation criteria. They’re just “being helpful.” Until they burn out.

Let’s call it what it is: execution overhead. Glue work is the maintenance cost of running a startup with unclear roles and underbuilt process. It’s not bad work. It’s necessary work. But when you pretend it’s personality, you lose the ability to improve it.

And here’s where the gender dynamics make things worse. Studies have shown, again and again, that women—especially women of color—are disproportionately asked to take on glue work. In a 2018 Harvard Business Review study, women were 44% more likely to be asked by managers to do non-promotable tasks. They’re also far more likely to volunteer. Not because they want to, but because early social conditioning teaches them it’s expected. It’s how they earn team belonging.

This isn't just a DEI footnote. It’s an execution risk. When critical coordination work is gendered, undervalued, and invisible, your company builds cultural debt. People who hold your systems together get passed over for promotions, treated like administrative staff, and quietly punished for not having “impact.” Then they leave. And when they do, you don’t just lose a teammate—you lose the scaffolding that made your mess work.

So how do you fix it?

Start by naming it. If your team has someone doing glue work, call it that. Don’t water it down with “collaboration” or “team player.” That’s how it gets buried again. Glue work is coordination, translation, and connection. It’s not noise. It’s signal. And if you don’t formalize it, you’re leaving essential execution to chance.

Next, document it. Ask your team to log the unassigned work they’re doing for two weeks. Meeting recaps, stakeholder handoffs, project updates, morale boosters, Slack clarifications—every “someone had to do it” moment should go in. What you’ll see is that the same person or small group is doing the vast majority of it. You’ll also see that these tasks are making everything else run better. That’s not a coincidence. That’s operational compensation.

Once you see the pattern, create structure. That means one of two things: either build glue work into actual roles with compensation and recognition, or rotate the responsibility across the team with clear expectations. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to be a project manager. It means everyone needs to understand that coordination is a shared load—not a silent sacrifice.

This is especially critical as you scale. In a three-person founding team, glue work can be informal. In a ten-person team, it needs containers. In a thirty-person team, it needs ownership. Otherwise, the person doing the glue work becomes the company’s unofficial API—and that’s a surefire way to introduce throughput bottlenecks and burnout cycles.

Founders often say “we’re all owners here.” But glue work exposes whether that’s true. Ownership isn’t just about product specs and OKRs. It’s about caring if the system works. It’s about noticing who’s catching the dropped balls—and deciding whether that’s fair, repeatable, or dangerous.

Here’s where most teams get it wrong: they think glue work is soft. It’s not. It’s a hard signal that your process isn’t keeping up with your ambition. If your best communicator is spending 30% of their week resolving internal misunderstandings, you don’t have a collaboration win—you have a structure miss. If your most consistent team player is also your most burnt out, you don’t have a resilience problem—you have an ops blindspot.

And if your highest-context operator isn’t in the room when critical decisions are made, you’re not scaling clarity—you’re scaling confusion.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Some of the best teams I’ve seen build glue work into their hiring plans. They name it explicitly. They treat it as leverage. They assign team ops roles early—not because it’s trendy, but because they understand that high-context systems don’t self-manage. They also use retrospective rituals to surface untracked work. Who bridged the gap? Who clarified the ambiguity? Who made the meeting actionable? Those names get credited—not just thanked.

If your company culture celebrates speed but ignores stability, glue work is the first place your system will crack. Because the faster you go, the more coordination matters. And the more pressure you add, the easier it is to overlook the people doing the quiet, continuous work of making your startup livable.

You can fix this. But it starts with admitting the system isn’t neutral. It favors extroverts, optimists, and over-functioners. It ignores context holders until the context breaks. And it makes invisible labor feel like loyalty.

You don’t need to fix everything at once. You just need to stop pretending that glue work isn’t real work. Start tracking it. Start paying for it. Start building systems around it. Because the truth is, glue work is the first step toward operational maturity. And companies that don’t recognize it won’t stay companies for long.

Here’s the founder math: if something is happening every week, and it's making your team better—but no one owns it, and no one measures it—then you’ve built a fragile system. Doesn’t matter if it’s a code deployment or a culture ritual. If it matters, it gets structure. If it doesn’t, it gets replaced by chaos.

Glue work won’t show up in your burn rate. But it’ll show up in your attrition. It won’t show up on your product roadmap. But it’ll show up in missed alignment and lost momentum. And it definitely won’t show up in your funding deck. But every investor will feel it in your execution tempo.

So ask yourself: who’s holding your team together? And do they know they’re allowed to stop?

If the answer is no, then you have your next job as a founder. Build the system. Share the load. Measure the work. Because no startup succeeds by accident—and no system scales if it’s built on silent sacrifice.