Are you the rock or the glue?

I had dinner recently with a couple I've known for years. We were talking about their life together, raising kids, managing careers, navigating the chaos of everyday existence.

"I'm the glue," the wife said, smiling at her husband. "And he's the rock."

It wasn't a complaint or a boast. She connects, mediates, remembers, and creates flow. He anchors, decides, protects, and holds steady. The glue and the rock. Each complemented the other. There was no hierarchy between their respective roles, but a shared acknowledgment of how they’d naturally organized themselves.

Driving home, I kept thinking about how easily they understood how they fit together. I rarely hear people describe their work this way. What if, instead of everyone scrambling to be the visionary or the closer, we recognized the fuller range of contributions that make organizations work? In my experience, it’s often our actions outside of our job descriptions or performance reviews that have the greatest impact on our teams.

We have plenty of language for what we do, our titles, skills, and responsibilities, but far less for who we are to the people around us, the interpersonal infrastructure. If you’re the person who brings energy into an otherwise flat Zoom meeting or who always helps new hires feel welcomed, you’re contributing massively to your team’s success, even if you’re not formally acknowledged for it.

Because this kind of work isn’t usually tracked, it’s easy to discount. You default to proving your value through numbers and outputs, and you start looking at others the same way. In the process, the relational layers of work get demoted. But these contributions aren't "soft skills;" they’re structural elements of healthy organizations.

I’ve come to see each individual’s disposition, instinct, and presence as part of an ecosystem. Different elements working in harmony. Not everyone plays the same role, but each brings their essential nature to the whole. There are six, in particular, that I see across teams repeatedly.

Six Essential Elements of Working Teams

Rock – The Anchor

Stability. Consistency. They’re reliable and predictable, remembering what matters, and remaining unmoved by passing storms. In chaos, they're ballast. When the team is off-kilter, they're gravity. That reliability creates safety for others to take risks. Over time, though, the same steadiness can become rigidity, resisting necessary change, anchoring the team to the past when the moment demands letting go.

Glue – The Connector

Relationship. Integration. An instinct for where people and ideas need to come together. They remember what you mentioned three months ago. They know who needs to talk to whom. Around them, nothing falls through the cracks. Peers feel remembered, seen, included. But they can become over-responsible for others' relationships, burning out while maintaining connections no one else tends to, losing themselves in everyone else's needs.

Fire – The Catalyst

Urgency. Activation. A willingness to burn away what isn't working and ignite what could be. They ask the questions no one wants to hear and push when everyone else is ready to settle. Their energy is contagious when momentum stalls. If it isn’t tempered, though, that same force can scorch the landscape, pushing too hard or too fast, alienating people or moving faster than the team can absorb.

Water – The Adapter

Flow. Flexibility. An ability to find a path forward when the direct route is blocked. They move around obstacles, wearing them down with patience. They work within constraints others find impossible. Without balance, they may avoid confrontation when direct action is needed, losing their shape trying to fit every container, becoming whatever others need instead of what they are.

Sun – The Illuminator

Warmth. Visibility. A gift of helping others see possibilities they couldn't see before. Their presence makes difficult things feel possible. They don't just encourage; they create conditions for everyone to thrive. People bloom around them. But others can begin to rely too heavily on that light, while Sun itself struggles to step back or ask for support.

Compost – The Transformer

Metabolism. Wisdom. The ability to take what's dying or dead - failed projects, hard lessons, mistakes - and turn it into usable wisdom. Nothing is wasted in their presence. They help teams metabolize hard experiences instead of just moving past them. When everything unresolved starts landing in the same place, though, that work becomes heavy. They may get stuck processing instead of moving forward, becoming the designated listener or therapist, losing themselves in others' decay.

Finding Your Element

As you read about these elements, pay attention to which ones describe something you recognize in yourself. This is the heart of the Know Yourself dimension of my work, beyond assessing your competencies. Notice what you naturally offer and where you might be performing a role that doesn't align with who you are.

You might show up as different elements in different contexts: at home versus at work, under stress versus in flow. You have range. What will make or break you is whether the element you're embodying in a given setting is chosen or conditioned, authentic or adapted.

The Gender Trap and Self-Limiting Beliefs

Before you settle on an element, watch for your learned assumptions. These roles aren't gendered or ranked, even though many of us have been conditioned to think they are.

Women aren't automatically Glue, and men don't have a monopoly on being Rock. Fire isn't masculine. Water isn't feminine. These are human capacities, available to all of us. Yet for centuries, workplaces have sorted us into boxes that serve organizational convenience over individual aptitude. Too many brilliant women dim their Fire because they were told it was "aggressive." Men hide their Glue qualities because care is framed as weakness.

Eventually, we enforce these limits ourselves. The woman who's Fire at home, driving her kids' growth, burning away family dysfunction, shows up at work as Water, adaptive and accommodating, because she learned her natural intensity wasn't welcome. We internalize those messages so deeply that our innate strengths become harder to access.

Your role doesn't define your element…

…and your element doesn't prescribe your job. I’ve seen people bring Fire to HR roles everyone assumed required softness. One CFO I know is pure Glue. Though she’s thought of as a numbers person, she's really the connective tissue between finance, strategy, and operations. People can breathe new life into positions others found constraining simply by being themselves.

When you stop performing a role as written and bring your nature to it, infinite possibilities open up. What’s expected of you is rarely the full measure of what the role can hold.

Seeing Each Other More Completely

Once you see your own element, start honoring these contributions in others. People rarely get credit for this work, but when they do, it creates a noticeable lift in camaraderie and trust. It's also a way of signaling that essential doesn't mean the same thing for everyone, that legitimacy isn't reserved for the loudest or most visible. You might tell your colleague:

"You're the Rock on this team. When everything was chaos during the merger, your steadiness kept us functional."

"You're Fire. When we were settling for good enough, you pushed us to actually solve the problem."

"You're Glue. I don't think anyone realizes how much you're doing to keep information flowing and people connected."

Your Challenge

Start noticing yourself.

Then, widen the lens.

The integration:

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My friends never sat down and assigned who would be Glue and who would be Rock. They noticed what was already true, named it, and let it be beautiful.

You are more than your job title or a list of deliverables. You're an essential element in the ecosystem of your team, your organization, your life. I hope this newsletter gives you language for what you already bring, and the confidence to stand on it.

Do you know which element you are? And are you letting yourself be it?

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Sending love and light,

Ginny