What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger?

I think we need to be more discerning about this concept, especially in the context of a job and career.

I have always been a fan of toughening up and powering through. Adversity can develop capabilities, but I think along the way, I got caught up in the satisfaction of finishing something difficult and savouring the achievements. Do this repeatedly and powering through becomes a strong muscle — heck, you even attach your identity to it as “someone who finishes what she started.” And when we become exceptionally good at compensating for a broken system, something else happens. Your boss praises you, you get more money, and you learn that being the “glue” pays.

When being the glue pays

However, there are two problems with this:

Firstly, talented people can mask organisational failures. Problems don’t get surfaced because they routinely compensate for missing structures, processes, tools and — dare I say — competency in others. Over time, the person becomes increasingly valuable, while the system becomes increasingly fragile.

Secondly, the strain this puts people under is oftentimes invisible or normalised. Talented people continue to receive social proof that their extraordinary effort is what excellence looks like. And like Superman, people expect the hero to continue to perform extraordinary feats and continue to sacrifice their time and energy for the team. This explains why smart and talented people can sometimes find themselves in a different sort of gilded cage.

More responsibilities, more trust, more money, more authority, bigger problems to solve — these look like the hallmarks of a successful career trajectory, which is why smart and talented people don’t leave broken systems. They believe they gain from its brokenness.

I know this pattern intimately; I was the glue and was handsomely rewarded for being one. And later, when I became a boss and a leader, and the company I co-founded was experiencing double-digit growth, I too relied upon and rewarded other human glue. We invested heavily in building processes to minimise heroics, but growth kept exposing areas that were overlooked or under-invested. So even as we tried to build a system that depended less on heroes, we continued to depend on them to keep the system running.

Not all adversity is created equal

There is a difference between developing capabilities from adversity versus adversity as an insatiable consumer of that capability.

So, how do you distinguish adversity that is healthy versus adversity that is unhealthy?

You’re thrown into the deep end but not without support — you learn tonnes, you acquire new skills, you got smarter. That’s healthy adversity.

You are doing the third project that is equally hard but not gaining any new skills nor depth. That’s unhealthy adversity.

What about this one? You are learning tricks to circumvent dysfunction — such as working with inadequate funding or resources, or operating in a role with no clear mandate nor authority to deliver on its objectives.

Versus this: you’re leading an ambitious project with objectives that stretch beyond what you have done before, but with the resources, a clear mandate and greater authority aligned with what you are being asked to do.

In both situations you are learning. The difference is whether leverage is growing alongside your responsibilities. Like you would not bring a knife to a gunfight, why would you accept a bigger job with no increase in firepower?

Indeed, learning to navigate politically is a new capability being unlocked, but it is success on the back of fighting for resources, working through ambiguity and potentially trading off personal favours.

So, as your capabilities and responsibilities grow, your formal leverage should also grow with them. Without adequate resources, mandate or authority, you have to build an informal machinery around yourself to keep succeeding. And over time, that machinery gets increasingly good at adapting to dysfunction.

Promotion and more money may not be sufficient evidence that you are progressing in your career. You might be just getting better at being human glue.

But why is that bad?

You’re a lynchpin, right? Consider this: some capabilities you can take with you to another job — things like your judgment, influence, resourcefulness, ability to operate under ambiguity. But some of what makes you extraordinarily effective isn’t capability at all. It is leverage that you have accumulated within the organisation: things like internal relationships and favours, institutional knowledge, and knowing where the back doors are to knock on. And the longer you lean on this leverage to succeed, the harder it is to see which capability gaps that leverage has been covering. For example, if you always know which doors to knock to get things done, you may never learn how to build a repeatable process that lets anyone do the job properly.

And depending on how fragile the system has become, like a house of cards, it might all come crashing down one day.

And the question would then be: what happens to you?

Further reading

  • Bakker, Demerouti et al., “Job Demands–Resources Theory: Ten Years Later” (Annual Review, 2023) — a useful review of decades of research distinguishing job demands from the resources people need to meet them, including why challenging work can contribute to growth and engagement under some conditions while becoming exhausting under others.
  • Bolino, Hsiung, Harvey & LePine, “‘Well, I’m tired of tryin’!’ Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Citizenship Fatigue” (2015) — research into what happens when employees repeatedly go beyond their formal responsibilities, and how organisational support and expectations influence whether that extra effort becomes draining. Probably the closest academic cousin to the human glue/Superman argument here.
  • DeFillippi & Arthur, “The Boundaryless Career: A Competency-Based Perspective” (1994) — the foundational career-capital paper distinguishing “knowing why,” “knowing how” and “knowing whom.” Useful alongside the question of which parts of professional effectiveness travel with us when we leave an organisation.