Leaders. You can recognize them from afar based on how they talk, present themselves, and what reputation they carry among others. Perhaps you are one of them or aspire to become such a figure in your new job. In either case, you need to present leadership skills on your resume. 

That’s a tough task. To effectively convey your leadership qualities to prospective employers, let’s first unpack what attributes makeup leadership skills. Then look at examples and exact phrases you can swipe for your resume.  

What are Leadership Skills? 

Leadership skills indicate your ability to organize and guide other people toward a shared goal. In a wider sense, leadership skills also include your ability to instill a sense of common purpose, guide others, rally support, and encourage positive change within others.

Most commonly, leadership skills manifest through the person’s leadership style:

• Autocratic leaders are determined, opinionated, and decisive. They prefer to call the shots and make decisions with limited group effort. But they’re also not afraid of taking responsibility for their solo decisions. 
• Coaching leaders bring out the best in others. They focus on nurturing the strengths of others and empowering them to work at their best capacity. They’re great mentors and supporters, but can also often push people beyond their limits (mostly for their own good). 
• Laissez-faire/Delegative leaders let their team handle things on their own, offering minimal direction and supervision. But they’re pretty keen on choosing the most capable people by their side and giving them room to take on responsibilities. 
• Transactional leaders value performance above all else. Hit the targets and you’re rewarded. Miss the mark, and you’ll hear about it.
• Servant leaders focus on problem-solving for their team. They’re here to make sure everyone has the resources and ‘headspace’ to thrive and progress faster. 

As you can guess from the above, each leadership style has a focus on slightly different skills —interpersonal, organizational, or conceptual skills. This means no two leaders are alike and the goal of your resume is to describe where you fit on the spectrum. 

Because organizations aren’t just seeking ‘generalist’ leaders—they look for cultural matches, especially for senior positions. 

Dave Anderson, former Tech Director at Amazon, revealed that the hiring team

Literary assigns specific Amazon leadership principles to each interviewer in the process. Those interviewers attempt to get a picture of how likely you are to be the type of leader we’re looking for.

Leadership Skills Examples for Resume

As mentioned, there’s no single definition of a ‘great leader’. However, there are certain soft skills and personality attributes hiring managers use to pre-screen applicants for senior positions. To make sure your application passes that first scan, consider including the following leadership skills for your resume. 

People Management 

A good leader must demonstrate strong people management skills —- abilities to effectively communicate, manage, and lead a team to maximize productivity and employee satisfaction. 

Being a social creature, any person knows how to interact with others. 

But far fewer know how to communicate with clarity, build rapport with just about anyone, and adapt their emotional response to different types of situations. All of these qualities are crucial for leaders as poor team dynamics ultimately means a failure to do their job well. 

McKinsey found that most leaders fail to tap into the primary motivators of their workforce, and thus inspire action. This results in unclear directions, wasted productivity, and low employee engagement. Showing that you know how to find common ground with others is a strong quality most companies seek. 

Here are some ways to convey your strong people management skills on a resume:

Emotional Intelligence 

Emotional intelligence is another important skill for leaders. It confers your aptitude for effectively dealing with your emotions and those of others. Good leaders don’t allow strong emotions like anger, fear, or anxiety to cloud their rational judgment. They know how to self-regulate and can diffuse tensions among the teams they lead.  And this translates to some great benefits for companies. Employees with emotionally intelligent managers are four times less likely to quit their jobs.

Use the following keywords to suggest you have a strong emotional intelligence:

Strategic Thinking 

Strategic thinking denotes your ability to analyze complex workplace and business issues and come up with effective solutions, aligned to the company’s goals. It involves a combination of business acumen, critical thinking, and strong analytics skills that make you an expert in identifying new opportunities, overcoming challenges, and making effective present-day decisions that set you up for future success. 

According to Wharton School research, leaders can think strategically and navigate the unknown effectively when they master six skills: abilities to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align, and learn. 

You can convey these effectively by adding the following phrases to your resume: 

• Conducting in-depth market research to identify and predict nascent market trends 
• Used NIST Cybersecurity Framework to implement effective risk mitigation strategies 
• Created an effective resource allocation framework to improve cross-department budget distribution 
• Facilitated change management after implementing a new digital workplace system
• Developed strategic alliances with three vendors to co-fund joint initiatives 
• Performed business scenario planning using PESTEL and VRIO methods 
• Introduced new team KPIs and personal OKRs to better measure individual contributions and impacts
• Helped implement a data-driven approach to assortment management with a new predictive analytics system.

Problem-Solving 

 Leadership involves systematically removing barriers that prevent you or others from reaching your goals. Similar to strategic thinking, strong problem-solving abilities help leaders successfully deal with roadblocks and setbacks. You have a keen eye to detect problems early on and a sharp brain to come up with creative fixes. 

Include the following words to your resume to convey your strong problem-solving capacities: 

Innovation

People often get promoted to leadership roles because of their innovative thinking — abilities to see things differently and shake things up to keep the team ahead of the curve. 

As such, innovation involves a good degree of creativity, strategic thinking, and strong analytical capabilities.  In terms of personal qualities, innovative leaders are also bold, decisive, and visionary i.e., can inspire the team to move towards an ambitious future goal. 

A recent study also found that innovative leadership behaviors also involve clear communication, planning, support, and role clarification. 

To best communicate your innovation abilities, sprinkle in the following keywords in your resume:

Bonus Leadership Skills for Resume

In addition to the above ideas, you can also find more in-demand leadership skills at the Global Leadership Development Study from Harvard: 

• Willingness and ability to take risks
• Ability to provide clarity and direction to team members in dynamic situations
• Ability to not just endure but embrace ambiguity and uncertainty
• Empathy in communication, feedback sharing, and listening
• Ability to manage conflict among team members
• Intent and ability to promote diversity and inclusion in the workforce 

Top Tip: Use the Job Description as Your Guidance 

Apart from listing the general leadership skills on your resume, look into the job description itself.  Most likely it will include some baseline requirements and preferred attributes. 

If there aren’t too many, hop to the company’s website and check out its Mission Statement. What type of values and culture do they promote? Your goal is to position yourself as a person who shares similar values and principles, both in your resume and then during the job interview. 

How to Describe Leadership Skills on Your Resume 

Make a list of leadership skills that are relevant to the position you are pitching. Then add them to your resume. 

There are several ways to do so organically:

• Incorporate the most important ones into your resume summary in the header areas. 
• Add several to a Skills section of your resume. (Not sure how to make one? Grab a professional resume template with a two-column design). 
• Weave in several more when describing your duties and accomplishments.

To help you out, we’ve also created several swipeable examples.  

Sample Leadership Skills Resume Phrases

For a general manager resume: 

• “I can align, lead, and grow world-class teams from 10 to 100 people.”
• “Effectively plan, prioritize, and divide work to maintain 90% on-time project delivery rate” 
• “Launched an employee training program; mentored over 20 junior hires”. 

For an executive resume: 

• “Offering watertight insight-led strategy and brilliant creative solutions for the manufacturing industry” 
• “Implemented a new bottom-up revenue stream and spearhead go-to-market strategies for new product launches” 
• “Optimized gross profit margins by 10% to drive sustainable growth and obtain extra budgets for R&D activities” 

Sample Leadership Experience Examples

Leadership skills do not always correlate with the seniority of the position. You can find plenty of group leaders at the grassroots of an organization and quite a few amorphic figures sitting atop. Even if you haven’t previously held a “manager” title, you can still demonstrate your strong leadership potential through other work experiences.  

For example, as a volunteer: 

• “Started a monthly local youth meetup to teach kids from underprivileged groups about the basics of entrepreneurship like business plan writing, cash flow, and go-to-market strategies. Grew the group from 3 to 30 people in 6 months.” 

Or on an individual contributor position like assistant property manager: 

• “Helped streamline the maintenance processes in managed rental units by advocating for the implementation of an automated management platform. Prepared and presented a business case to the company leadership.” 

Bonus tip: You don’t need to mention every leadership skill and experience on your resume. 

Leave some for your cover letter and the job interview itself. If you are applying for a managerial position, high chances are that the recruiter ask different situational and behavioral interview questions to evaluate your leadership and interpersonal skills. 

Wait, But What If I Don’t Know What My Leadership Skills Are? 

Relax, that’s something you can easily find out by asking around. Approach some of your friends, colleagues, and subordinates and ask for their feedback. Since most people will find it hard to pin down a specific skill right on the spot, ask them to just start telling you about what they think of your abilities to manage, lead, and influence others.

This can be a nice exercise to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to leadership. 

Speaking of the latter, if you feel that your leadership skills are limited or do not fully match the position you are eyeing, you can always do some learning. 

Here’s how to improve leadership skills:

• Sign up for a coaching/mentorship session with a senior leader in your space. 
• Pick up a new book from a leader you admire. 
• Get some hands-on training through volunteering. 
• Work more on your communication skills.
• Start taking a more active part in your team/department’s social life.
• Pick up several new negotiation and persuasion techniques. 
• Work on developing better situational awareness skills.
• Network more actively and learn from others!

Remember: Few good leaders are born. Most are self-made. 

To Conclude 

Leadership skills are multi-faceted and somewhat hard to pin down to a specific list of items. Perhaps, Bill Gates said it best:

The leader needs to create an environment in which people can analyze the situation and develop a good response.  

Showcase that you can lead through your work experience, accomplishments, and project tracking. Don’t get overly focused on using ‘leader’ as many times as you can on your resume. Instead, focus on telling how you can make an impact among other team members, and how jointly you can accomplish more for the employer.

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