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In the current context where companies are permanently searching for talents who work (and deliver) in various areas and are capable of adapting quickly and correctly to sudden changes, the Glue Person concept continues to generate controversy, and at the same time it is reaching relevance in talent management departments.
The beginnings of the theory
It all started with the intent of offering a guide that would help to better adapt to job changes and achieve long-term success in careers where high performance is needed.
That is when Neil Irwin, senior journalist correspondent at The New York Times, raised in his book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, the job success that Glue people achieve thanks to their competitive and empathy strengths.
This concept is based on the opinions of leaders and decision makers of companies focused on creating technological solutions, and the main focus was to learn their personal considerations as to what a company needs to be successful in a highly competitive environment.
The main conclusion he reached after interviewing them is that the most desired and valued attribute is the ability to work as a team and to pull together teams, a quality that is not always easy to achieve.
“If you think about a team that has people who are engineers on it and people who do some kind of marketing and product work, an optimal engineer is someone who is a really good engineer who is at least as good at marketing as they can be, without being worse as an engineer”, N. Irwin writes as a corporate example and personal experience.
As a result, the Glue People idea emerged, a concept that defines people who are good both at performing their core functions and at understanding the perspective and position of adjacent work teams.
In other words, the Glue People have the ability and initiative to unite work teams that add value to the operations and results of the organization as a whole, which translates into better results than performing the functions separately.
Attitude & Experience: more than a skill
In a first deduction when describing the Glue people, we discover that they are people who are willing to go beyond their limits and their routinary functions imposed by a contract or by a certain area. They are open to explore, to contribute and to generate the union through a cohesion of intelligent talent, as long as the work is built in a positive way.
These people are more visionary by nature, a virtue that implies an open attitude and willingness to discover new things and inventiveness, inside and outside their work area. They also have strengths such as empathy, organization, insight, and positive demystification of roles.
By combining these skills, we speak of a broadly strategic person, since, by actively knowing their environment, they are naturally present in other areas, which helps to increase their network of contacts and open up new career opportunities.
But what about the experience factor? Obviously a good attitude is not enough to perform specific tasks.
“There are people who are really good at one thing and only a little good at another. Then there are others who are in the middle, and they know some engineering, they know some marketing, they know some product development. They are often team leaders, people who build a product in many different types of organizations,” explains Irwin.
That is why these people must have the necessary skills and training to trigger their work experience, in this way the learning curve is accelerated and, at the same time, they expand their knowledge applied to reality.
A Glue Person in a technology organization
The good news is that the Glue people work in any niche but, speaking of the technology sector, there are specific circumstances going on.
This type of people usually implement engineering in an amazing way, since technological organizations are usually linked to disruptive changes, implementation of new processes and teamwork for the construction of digital projects.
Of course, there is also a strong belief that people dedicated to technology are more comfortable working individually, in addition to preferring to avoid social contact to carry out work.
Glue People then propose a different work environment than the one technology organizations are used to, where teamwork is enjoyed instead of avoided.
These people have the challenge of promoting a new culture of collaboration in an environment where it is practically unknown, which have the objective of building positive long-term working relationships.
At Icalia we are aware of the value these people add to our team, that is why we are constantly looking for the best talent, capable of working together, with our clients' goals always in sight.
Contact us right now and start with that development that will lead your organization to reach its goals and expectations. You put the dream, we take care of taking you to it.
