Hubris and the Denigration of the Glue People
More than twice in my career I have encountered situations where Engineers were busily instantiating capabilities no customer asked for, while Sales was pursuing customers who would never be able to integrate or utilize the resulting solution, and leadership was focusing on UX minutiae while ignoring a complete lack of understanding of the actual market, addressable or otherwise. In one case this happened in a 12 person startup; in another it was at a 50,000+ employee giant.
I thought about these experiences last week when a blog post by Lorin Hochstein titled 'Contempt for the Glue People' surfaced on Hacker News. The center piece of the blog post is a transcript of a 2015 interview with then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt where he said:
When I was at Novell, I had learned that there were people who I call “glue people”. The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups, and they assist in activity. And they are very, very loyal, and people love them, and you don’t need them at all.
In the interview Schmidt goes on to describe the incredible efforts he undertook to rid Novell, and later Google, of people who matched this description. This Moby Dick-level of hunting for and hounding out of people reminded me of another leader of a great American business, Jack Welch:
"Neutron Jack," as he became known, had a practice of ranking employees and automatically firing the bottom 10 percent every year; in Welch's first few years of leadership he fired more than 100,000 people in a series of mass layoffs and factory closures.
In the case of GE, among the first to be devalued and let go were 'middle managers', people whose roles were almost entirely defined by providing the services of organizational glue.
Employee ranking is a ruthlessly political exercise, in the same way that torture is: the questions asked, and the answers that are expected or desired, tell much more about the people doing the ranking than about those who are ultimately ranked.
In the case of Larry Schmidt, the tell is in this statement:
At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people, because they were getting in the way, because they slowed everything down.
A common belief of American executive managers is that they possess both the power and the skill necessary to simply be able tell people what to do, after which people should just get on with the job, without the need for any further clarification, or coordination, or rationalization, or justification of any kind.
The problem with this belief is simply that people are, well, people, and at all times have all sorts of questions and misconceptions and misunderstandings and good ideas that need to be heard, and professionally and emotionally addressed, for the work to move forward.
The idea that a single executive (or executive team) could, on their own, by simply telling people what to do, satisfy these human needs for connection and communication and understanding necessary to what we call, after all, knowledge work, is sheer hubris.
The notion that meeting these human needs is somehow 'slowing things down' or 'getting in the way' is a very bad idea that has resulted in the destruction of numerous once-great American companies, the commodification and loss of their uniquely skilled work forces, and the dehumanization of their resulting workplaces, pursuing mechanically measurable performance and compliance at the expense of the types of intangible human labor which so often result in greatness.
It should not need to be said, but here we are: humans perform at their best when their basic human needs are met. Teams where Glue people actively seek to question and clarify and coordinate and align are generally more successful than teams where Glue people do not do these things.
In all these ways the denigration of the Glue people, founded in hubris and denial of the humanity of the work force, is an anti-pattern for success.
About Me
I'm a full lifecycle innovation leader with experience in SaaS, ML, Cloud, and more, in both B2B and B2B2C contexts. As you are implementing your value proposition, I can take a data driven approach to helping you get it right the first time. If that seems helpful to you, please reach out.