Being the glue isn’t always super.

You know who you are. You’re the person who gets shit done. You’re the glue that holds your team together. You know enough about how to do everyone’s job to be dangerous. You can pick up the slack if someone is overloaded. You can mock up a comp, put together a wireframe and write a little code. You do whatever needs to be done to meet your deadline. You spend late nights doing tasks that are not part of your job description because hey, if you don’t do it, no one will. And it has to get done.

Your team loves you. Yet you don’t get glowing reviews from your manager, or from your clients. And you can’t figure out what’s wrong.

I know you. I’ve been your manager. I was you. I was glue.

The problem is that your official job is probably something other than “glue”. You most likely have a specific list of tasks that you were hired to do. And if you don’t do those tasks, they don’t get done. So when you’re off wearing your cape saving the day, tasks go unfinished (and often unstarted). Or you get to your job after 16 hours of firefighting when you’re exhausted, and you rush through your list so you can go home and get a few hours of sleep before coming back and doing it all again the next day. Or, someone else ends up doing your work, while you’re doing someone else’s work, and the cycle continues.

Gluefolk always have the best intentions and the interests of the team and project at heart. They are often in a project management role, tasked with ensuring project completion. It’s easier for them to do the work themselves than to have difficult conversations around workload, deadlines and prioritization with their team or project sponsors. It’s easier to put in the extra hours and cover for a teammate who simply has more work than he or she can handle than to tell your client that you won’t hit a date, or ask your project sponsor to prioritize features for the next release.

Unfortunately having the hard conversations will make for a better end product. As in sports, playing out of position rarely helps your team get ahead. You need to focus on what your role is and make sure you’re playing your position as well as you possibly can before helping a teammate. Just like the airline safely instructions tell you, make sure you’re oxygen mask is in place before helping others. Doing your job right will make everyone else’s job easier, so do that first. If you’ve done your job well and are able to help, help, But be sure you’re not using taking on more work as a way to avoid hard conversations.