The Art of the Glue Piece
serious riffing on a pop-topic, Jon Levy’s “glue players” from his new book, Team Intelligence
2025 essay
The Hierarchy of Glue
I first learned the term “glue piece” through chess, though it’s not canonical there.
Shane Battier writes in The Player’s Tribune about his personal achievements as a glue guy.
Both team sports and chess are games of strategy, where glue is essential.
Organizational strategy is messier than team sports and chess, which helps glue hide.
Levy describes organizational glue players as empathetic, quietly competent connectors who make everyone else look good.
His advice to “look for those who volunteer in the community” might sound poetic, but it’s hardly practical.
That Levy’s work is resonating now is diagnostic of how the world has shifted.
Strategy today is about dynamic control of time and space. Organizations now demand fluid coordination, upping the ante on glue.
Levy’s glue players can be extraordinary because modern organizations resemble the very environments that first shaped the player.
Glue itself is universal. Glue work is momentary. Glue roles are conditional. And only some teams require a dedicated glue piece. Levy describes the character profile of someone who glues by instinct.
Glue Roles Simply Appear
Glue is an ecological function: the system itself produces both the problem and the solution. All ecosystems self-correct toward equilibrium. Coherence means organizational homeostasis.
Some teams don’t need a glue player, others break without one. Glue roles are conditional.
They emerge at the intersection of complexity + velocity, a couple ingredients that warp alignment.
The organizational physics demand coherence faster than structure can supply it, naturally pulling a glue role into existence.
Here’s a great short story: I play in an over-30 soccer league that’s competitive enough to care. On one team, some of the guys would chirp the one guy who was definitely the worst. I suggested to the captain we move him up top, and 20 minutes later he was strutting down the field after scoring his SECOND goal. Ahh, system flow. You can feel it in your body. Two people knew why he was positioned there and he wasn’t one of them. That’s glue work, baby.
The Roles Glue Depends On
A team thrives when complementary roles are coordinated. Without trust, coherence erodes. With glue, everyone performs closer to their best.
Visible Leader: provides direction and signal
Visible leadership shows up everywhere. Visible leadership scores the goal, quiet leadership nabs the assist.
Glue is a support role, playing off visible leadership’s signal, building its confidence by making it feel more understood.
Operator: manages process and cadence
Operators are experts in repetition. Glue smooths their friction, empowering them with support.
Specialist: owns depth and technical expertise
Specialist's depth balances glue’s breadth. Glue boosts their contributions. Glue makes specialists feel more seen.
Glue Player Profile
Levy’s mythology describes normal humans organized around coherence as their internal operating system. Coherence is one of nature’s principles.
People organized by coherence feel data, notice patterns across contexts, and respond to drift because they can’t not. In that way, a glue player annoys itself before everyone else.
Glue players lead from the back like an elder elephant. They notice through attunement over volume and respond to what goes unsaid and unseen. Their influence travels through resonance.
Coherence orientation produces a distinct skill constellation. Breadth tracks across, fluidity moves between, attunement reads subtle signals, and selflessness prioritizes system health.
The same qualities have predictable limitations and vulnerabilities.
Movement
Glue players thrive in the open space between teams. Glue players move laterally across disciplines and shift altitudes with ease.
They can sit in every room, yet belong to none. They navigate gray space without fear, metabolizing contradiction into something productive.
They code switch between executives and juniors and they float between strategic height and tactical weeds without growing disoriented.
Tradecraft
Glue work shows up subtly but decisively.
It sounds as simple as a question.
It looks like positioning someone else for success.
It feels like relief when a meeting drifting off-course is steered back with humor and diplomacy.
To teammates, it can feel like belonging. To leaders, it can feel like a chance to exhale.
Micro-moments scale up thematically into system coherence across people, teams, and organizations.
Class
Glue plays the game of devil’s advocacy with finesse, uses curiosity to benefit a room, and absorbs the system’s awkwardness in service of it.
At their best, glue players become visible leadership’s second nervous system, extending their capacity to think, feel, and direct.
Glue players are always felt but rarely recalled, because they vanish before the memory forms.
Closing
Like everything universal, glue just is. Naming it is only revealing a pattern.