Leader as Matchmaker: How to Connect Work and People for Maximum Impact

Read Time: 4 minutes.

The Leadership Equation You've Never Seen

Here's the simplest way to think about leadership:

Your Job = Work to Do + People to Do It

That's it. Everything else is overhead.

Your role isn't to do more work. It's to constantly optimize the match between work that needs doing and people available to do it.

Most leaders get this backwards. They see a problem and think, "How can I solve this?" The right question is: "Who can help us solve this, and do they have what they need?"

You don’t need to be the star player.

You need to be the matchmaker.

Why Leaders Burn Out (And Teams Underperform)

The Doing Trap: When work piles up, leaders default to doing it themselves. Every task you take on is a task someone else doesn't learn to do.

The Resource Fight: Most leaders fight for more people or accept more work. Few systematically evaluate whether the current match is optimal.

The Weekly Matchmaking Audit

Every Sunday, spend 30 minutes asking:

Work Questions:

• What work is my team doing that someone else should own?

• What work are we not doing that we should be?

• What work could we stop doing without meaningful impact?

People Questions:

• Who on my team is underutilized?

• Who is overwhelmed with the wrong kind of work?

• What skills do we need that we don't have?

Match Questions:

• Where is great work being done by the wrong people?

• Where are great people stuck with the wrong work?

• What's one change I could make this week to improve the match?

The Resource “Fight” Framework

How to Fight for More People: "Based on our workload, we need two additional people to avoid missing commitments. Here's the specific impact..."

How to Fight for Less Work: "We're committed to 12 initiatives. If everything is a priority, nothing is. Which 3-4 should we focus on?"

How to Fight for Reality: "Do more work with the same people," is wishful thinking. Force the choice: "I can deliver X with current resources or Y with additional resources. Which is more important?"

Building Your "Borrowed People" Network

The Investment:

• Offer your team's expertise generously to other projects

• Make introductions that benefit their careers

• Share credit generously

The Ask: Be specific about scope, explain what they'll gain, make it easy for their manager to say yes.

Common Matchmaking Mistakes

The Hero Complex: "It's faster if I do it myself."
Fix: Ask "Who could learn to do this?"

The Comfort Zone Trap: Assigning work based on who's done it before.
Fix: Regularly stretch people into adjacent skills.

Scope Creep Acceptance: Saying yes without adjusting existing commitments.
Fix: Every new "yes" requires an explicit "no" to something else.

Advanced Matchmaking Strategies

The Capacity Buffer: Always operate at 80% capacity, not 100%. The 20% buffer allows for unexpected opportunities and strategic thinking space.

The Work Elimination Diet: Monthly, ask: "What would we stop doing if we had to cut 20% of our work?" Then stop doing those things anyway.

The People Multiplication Strategy: Instead of asking for more people, ask: "How could we help our current people be 20% more effective?" Often the answer is better tools, clearer processes, or more focused priorities.

Measuring Matchmaking Success

Team Health Indicators:

• People working in their strengths 80% of the time

• No one consistently working over capacity

• Clear ownership for every major initiative

• Regular skill development happening

Business Impact Indicators:

• Higher quality outputs

• Faster project completion times

• Increased team satisfaction scores

• More valuable work getting done

Just One Step

This week:

1. List all current work your team is doing

2. Categorize it using the Matchmaking Audit

3. Identify your biggest mismatch

4. Make one change to improve the match

Your job isn't to be the best individual contributor. It's to create conditions where your team can do their best work.

The question isn't whether you can do the work yourself. It's whether you're optimizing the alignment between work and people to maximize impact.

Great leaders own the space between work and people.

What You Missed This Week

Our Sunday AM posts:

📌 11 Lessons to Change How You Think (Dave on LI)
📌 9 Magnetic Leadership Skills (Mar on LI)
📌 20 High-Signal X Accounts to Fix Your Feed (Dave on X)

And here are our most popular posts last week:

🔥 10 Bad Leadership Habits to Unlearn ASAP (Dave on LI)
🔥 The 2-Minute Habit to 10x Team Performance (Dave on X)
🔥 12 Hidden Rules for Peak Performance (Mar on LI)

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Thank you for reading. Appreciate you!

Dave