Structure Drawn from: Essay
Where the structure comes from
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist who lived from 1828 to 1910. He published the short story Master and Man in 1895.
**Spoilers below***
In the story, Vasili, the protagonist, treats Nikita, the hired man, as a tool. He pays him 80 when he should have earned 100. His justification: Nikita is a drunk, and no one would hire him.
The story shows Nikita’s resourcefulness on a snow-filled trip. His skills in protecting the horse, his strength to dig and turn a sled into a mobile shelter that protected the horse, are contrasted with Vasili, where his two fur coats disconnect him from the harsh environment.
Vasili realizes that sitting idle is of no use. He abandons Nikita and rides off alone.
As fate would have it, the ride circles back to the same spot where Nikita was left for dead.
Vasili has underestimated Nikita’s skill in keeping the horse alive – the one ‘factor’ that will determine the success of the voyage.
Nikita does not accuse him. He asks that his wages go to his boy, and he apologizes for the trouble.
Then Vasili does something unthinkable.
He takes off his fur coat, lies down full length on top of the freezing Nikita, and holds him through the night.
Vasili dies. Nikita lives another twenty years.
The essay concept rests on one idea - a man whose profession is valuation corrects the fundamentals of how he values and protects the person he once thought was disposable.
Dennis Organ
Dennis Organ is an American organizational psychologist. In 1988, he published Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome and later, in a corrected version in 1997, "It's construct clean-up time," where he talks about contextual performance - contribution to the social and psychological environment in which task performance happens.
Axis one is what a person produces on their own.
Axis two is what a person's presence does to everybody else's output.
Most job appraisal form even now measures only Axis One – because it is visible and easy to count.
Diane Bergeron
Diane Bergeron is an American management researcher. She answered the question Organ's revision leaves open – how do you balance visible contribution with the Invisible Glue that makes the task successful?
Her 2007 paper in the Academy of Management Review used a resource-allocation framework.
Time is finite.
Hours spent on the context are hours not spent on the task.
She argued the penalty is worst under five conditions - when the reward system is outcome-based instead of behavior-based, when roles are ambiguous, when the work is not visible, when colleagues do not reciprocate, and when the work is difficult and slow.
In her 2013 study with Shipp, Rosen, and Furst in the Journal of Management, using records of 3,680 employees at a professional services firm, they found that time on task performance mattered more than collaboration time for performance evaluation, salary increase, advancement speed, and promotion.
Holding task time constant, employees who spent more time on collaboration received smaller raises and advanced more slowly.
Tanya Reilly
Tanya Reilly is a software engineer. She was a staff systems engineer at Google and then a principal engineer at Squarespace, and she wrote The Staff Engineer's Path in 2022.
She gave the Invisible Glue its industry name.
The phrase started as a comment on an internal post at Google, became a document, and then became a talk called "Being Glue," first given at Write/Speak/Code in New York.
Her story elaborates the invisible glue.
An engineer joins, struggles with a hard codebase, and turns out to be good at unblocking other people.
She answers the customer's question.
She spots two teams doing the same work and gets them talking.
She onboards the juniors.
Her calendar fills.
Her manager treats her as a lead and gives her excellent feedback.
Then the promotion round comes, and she is passed over because she shipped no code.
Why it carries this name
The new joinee who learned fast because one person mentored the new joinee.
A deal that almost got canceled, but one person took the client outside a professional setting and explained the dynamics of the deal.
A phone call that saved a partnership.
A consistent presence of a brand ambassador that gave the customer the confidence to go with the company.
Invisible Glue is not an empathy essay.
The applicant is not being generous to a lesser colleague.
It is a re-assessment essay.
The applicant is correcting a number they got wrong while claiming to be good at numbers and evaluating talent.
When to use it, and when not to
When it works
Case Study: Mr M led a four-plant cost program at a German industrial group and gave appraisal input for a team of eleven.
Mr B was a process planner from the Regensburg site, in his fifties, placed in the bottom band in two consecutive appraisals.
Mr M kept him because German labor law made both his removal and his replacement slow.
I appraised my team of 11 plant operators and planners.
Mr. B was at the bottom in the Spring appraisal and at the bottom again in the Autumn appraisal. Both times I wrote that his analysis came in late, that he worked in his own spreadsheet instead of the planning tool we had taken to the cloud. I negatively assessed that he wrote four hundred words when the answer was a date.
I ran the program from Munich while Mr. B worked from Regensburg.
Despite his low performance, I kept him for two reasons - a hire at a site our size needs the works council's consent, and a layoff puts the company in front of a labor court.
I told my director I was carrying him to save cost and disruption.
In February, the board review preponed the deadline by four weeks.
Mr. B was six days late on the footprint model.
I took his role for the next two weeks.
Day two: I called the works council chair twice and got nothing.
Mr. B asked whether he should ring. The chair called me back within the hour.
Mr. B has been calling before every headcount question for four years, because the chair prefers a personal call over a presentation.
Day four: There were eleven part numbers flagged in Mr.B’s move list with no explanation attached. I read that as sloppy work and asked him about it.
Every part we make has a technical drawing from the customer, with dimensions and the tolerance – allowed variations- marked on either side of it. A shaft at forty millimeters, plus or minus two hundredths. Inside that band the part passes the scrutiny. Outside the specification, the part is scrap.
Sometimes a part comes out slightly outside the acceptable band and still works.
If their engineers agree, they sign a deviation permit - a written agreement to take a part that does not match its own drawing.
Those eleven part numbers all worked on one deviation permit.I did not know one clause in this arrangement.
A permit is granted against one process at one site. The customer never agreed that the part is acceptable in general.
They agreed that this press, in this plant, with these operators, passes.
Move the work and the permit outside that one operator; the permit does not move with it.
We would have to produce sample parts on the new line, measure every dimension on the drawing, document the capability, and submit the file for approval before we could ship a single unit.
It would have cost us weeks per part number, sometimes months, and no revenue from that line would have actualized until the customer signs.
My savings case had labor, floor space, energy, logistics, and overhead in it. It had not planned for a single re-qualification.
Day six: Lena joined us in January as an industrial engineer. She asked me which standard times she could take from the system for the Regensburg presses.
A standard time is the allowed minutes for one operation, set by an engineer with a stopwatch. It decides how many parts an hour a line can make, how many people a shift needs, what one part costs us in labor, and, where there is a bonus, what the operator earns.
Because the standard time impact wages, the number is agreed with the works council.
Changing the standard time reopens wage negotiation.
So nobody changed one.
After the 2021 retooling, four of the presses ran faster than the time in the system. The times were never reset. Every operator on that floor knows. Every shift leader plans around it. None of it is written anywhere, because writing it down starts a conversation with the council that the plant does not want.
She had no way to find out. There is no flag on the record. Mr. B normally told her outside the official communication to avoid disruption.
By the second week, I understood the arrangement.
The chair took Mr. B’s call because he was forty minutes away and had been for thirty years.
Lena asked Mr. B because she could turn her chair around and see him.
None of the work that Mr. B did – the work that kept the factory floor operating smoothly could fit into a neat status column we had designed for the appraisal.
The work could not be done from Munich in how I tried to do.
There should be someone in Regensburg.
When the March appraisal began, I put Mr. B among the top performers.
I accepted the 400-word description in each column to explain the complexity of each task.
In 2025, I moved to the drives division in September.
Last I heard from Lena, Mr. B runs the plant interface for the whole program now.
The essay works because Mr. M is right about the thing he measured – speed of the task.
Mr. B was slow.
The error is in not measuring Mr. B’s collaboration skills and skills in keeping the operation running smoothly.
The change – add a new appraisal column where the collaboration skills and effort are measured and graded.
Even the task could be explained in 400 words instead of just a metric. And rightly so.
Mr. B is leading the plant interface.
He knows the regulations, work permits, and the cost constraints of the company.
Why it fails
- Do not use the concept if you did not hold appraisal authority.
- Do not use it if the low rating turns out to have been wrong
- Do not make the other person noble.
- Do not end with a general truth about leadership like, "I learned that great leaders see their people as more than a number."
- Do not claim the other person's later success.
- Do not present the system as a defense, with lines like, "The appraisal process at my firm made this outcome inevitable."
Where the Concept applies in the Essay
- Opening
- Middle
- Transition
- Closing
Position in the essay: Middle, Closing
