Leadership skills are always at the top of a hiring manager’s priority list.
It doesn’t matter how experienced you are or what function you work in, making things happen with others is central to most roles. Demonstrating these leadership skills on your resume and cover letter is therefore an important step to securing that interview.
You bring value if you have a top skillset, but if you multiply that value if you are able to level up the performance of those around you. Great leaders raise the output of the collective. That is a valuable commodity indeed.
With the variety and nuance of leadership skills that you could mention, how do you decide which are most important and how you might include them in your resume? What are the leadership needs of those that will be around you? What would make the most difference to the company? Let’s consider the following:
- What are leadership skills?
- Which leadership skills do employers value most?
- How to include leadership in your resume?
- 10 leadership skills with examples for your resume
- How to tell your leadership story in your cover letter
Developing your leadership skills will make a difference to you, those around you and to your employer. Leaders are not born; they are made. Tell your future boss the story of how you became the leader that you are today. Leadership is a journey and they will hope that you will grow further in your leadership abilities with them. They will be keen to nurture you in this endeavour.
I’m not a manager. Why are leadership skills important for me?
You don’t have to be a manager to be a leader. If your colleagues look to you for guidance, you are a leader. If you make a decision that other people respect, you are a leader. If you volunteer for a difficult task and set an example, you are a leader. If you can talk through such situations in your resume and during your job search, your future employer may see you as a leader too.
What are leadership skills?
Great leaders take their people with them on a journey of personal development and business success. Both the challenges and makeup of their teams will vary, so the suite of leadership skills that any leader will be required to deploy at any one time will change with the demands of the situation that they face.
Each leadership skill (as with any behaviour) comprises a great deal of nuance and its effectiveness will greatly depend on how it is delivered.
Delegating a task politely, while offering a reason and making sure that there is a benefit for the person doing it is likely to be successful. Bluntly telling someone to do it may not be.
Every leader is different and there are certain aspects of leadership that you will naturally gravitate towards. As with cultural fit, if the leadership fit is right between you and your future employer, your chances of getting the job will increase significantly.
Which leadership skills do employers value most? Every employer will place a different value onto each leadership skill. Some cultures will be strong on creativity and vision, while others will centre around planning and change management. If you do your homework, you will be able to write a leadership-led resume that reflects the sort of qualities that your future employer values. Great resumes get down to this granular level of detail.
How to highlight leadership skills when applying for jobs
One of the simplest signposts to your leadership capabilities on your resume comes in your job title. In terms of how future employers will perceive you, having the word manager or team leader at the end of your title will create a favourable impression. It is well worth negotiating impressive sounding titles with employers for exactly this reason, but you should resist the temptation to make them up on your resume. It is not hard to check.
Surprisingly, the place where you should never list your leadership skills is in the resume skills section. You need to be able to show off the behaviors and impacts of your leadership, so a brief “influencing skills” description won’t cut it. Resume skills should be reserved for the harder technicals skills that will make you stand out from your competition.
The best places to organically weave leadership skills into your career story are in the resume summary and employment history section. Your future employer will know what is involved with your various achievements, so although you may not be explicit about the skills that you utilised, they will be able to read between the lines.
What is the most important leadership skill?
If a leader is not proficient in written and oral communication, then all the other skills are suddenly so much less effective. Creativity is no use if you cannot translate your vision to others. Planning is pointless if no one understands their role. Change management will fall at the first hurdle, as there won’t be a clear direction. Communication underpins everything about leadership.
10 Leadership skills with examples for your resume
These top ten leadership skills form a part of every leader’s interpersonal toolkit.
1. Creativity
Being a conduit for innovation and creativity at the head of a team is one of the most powerful leadership qualities. When people have a leader who is happy to hear their diverse ideas and give them a chance to prove their validity, they will be brave in their decisions and push the boundaries further than the competition.
Varied perspectives bring unexpected solutions in a creative team – you never know when the next bright idea will come along. This leadership skill makes you someone to follow for breakthrough ideas.
“Developed a totally new way of recruiting customer service staff by advertising to our loyal customers. People love the brand – 45% increase in applications.”
2. Planning
Setting objectives, hitting milestones and achieving goals is the fuel of a high-performing team that is going places. Ambitious employees only learn when they are on a journey, so great planning skills help to keep everyone on track. Leaders use strong facilitation and problem-solving skills to keep projects ticking along, and risk management often plays a significant role in being prepared for the inevitable unforeseen obstacles.
Most people in a company have so much going on that they find it hard to plan. When there is a leader who manages to tie all the relevant threads together into a cohesive plan, everyone feels more secure in their work.
“Facilitated a planning session for a project with over 30 internal and 10 external contributors. Managed the critical path and finished 15% ahead of schedule.”
3. People management
Managing the varied personalities of those around you and building a cohesive team that pulls in the right direction lies at the core of people management. There are a whole host of leadership skills required to give everyone the space and opportunity to develop together.
Recruiting the right blend of talent and retaining them is a key measure of success, but sometimes you just have to look at who has moved on to better things. People management skills means making a difference to others for their benefit, reaping the rewards while they are with you, but knowing that they will also leave you becuase of you.
“Developed a group of young graduates into the most successful sales team in the company’s history. 70% of them have now been promoted and moved on.”
4. Adaptability
Rolling with the punches and adapting when you need to (or even before you need to) is a key attribute of any leader. When your team has a certain amount of momentum it is not easy to change direction, but the more adaptable the leader, the easier their people will be able to transition from goal to goal.
Be accountable in your response to change, check back that you are on the right path and never stop iterating. One of the key leadership skills is knowing when to change your leadership approach. When the environment around you changes, you need to adapt with it.
“Realising that our project was not achieving our goals, so we reset our ambitions, changed scope and sourced a new partner to eventually hit our budget target.”
5. Communication
Conveying your ideas and the ideas of your team to a broad audience is key to getting everyone on board and looking in the same direction. Relationships improve, there is less conflict and innovative ideas have the chance to be aired. When people are clear about the thoughts of others, they can modify their speech and behaviors to create a harmonious and productive atmosphere.
Written skills cannot be underestimated in the leader’s armoury: influencing others when they read your words is an essential communication skill. It is also a fact that every great leader needs to be a fantastic listener. It's an important soft skill for any leader.
“I was the go-to bid writer for our procurement team, winning over 60% of tenders. 2,000 words can make the difference – if they are the right words.”
6. Vision
Sometimes you need to have strategic thinking to be able to see three steps ahead and anticipate what is to come. Big picture thinking means constantly questioning whether you are on the right path to a destination that may lie far in the future. Your analytical skills in such future gazing should be top notch and your fingers should always be on the pulse of your market to detect any changes that may alter your path.
Leadership skills depend on taking your team on a journey - the best leaders share a picture of what the future looks like and map out the route to get there.
“Spotted a client management trend in the FinTech area that allowed us to increase our marketing touch points with clients by 75%”
7. Decisiveness
One of a leader’s roles is to rubber stamp difficult decisions that could have gone either way. It is rare to find a total consensus in any team, so decisiveness proves to be a key leadership skill. People follow a leader because they trust their judgement – a leader who wavers and is constantly unsure will not inspire anyone.
Be brave, take the plunge and make decisions with the best possible facts and opinions at your disposal at any given time. Everyone has doubts that plague their dreams - while a leader should not hide their vulnerability, it is a useful example for those that follow them if they are seen to have the courage of their convictions.
“Facing a deadline of a week to decide on the final brand direction, we worked nights to enable us to make the best possible decision.”
8. Change management
Understanding change, overcoming the resistance to change and then implementing change is a constant cycle of renewal and reassessment for any leader. The leadership skill of change management requires a strong process orientation and an ability to understand how all the different cogs of the machine related to each other.
A leader is required to drive through change and communicate the vision as the process is rarely without obstacles. Often business development managers will showcase this in their resumes.
“Having 60% of the team change after a business merger was no simple proposition, but we recovered and were beating our budget within 4 months.”
9. Delegation
No boss can do everything by themselves and only the worst ones try to. When you have a mountain of work to do, you need to understand who is best placed to do it (also who would benefit from doing it). Delegating a difficult task to someone and mentoring them through it is one of the best ways of achieving your goals.
You don’t have to tell them what to do, merely set them off in the right direction and give them a nudge whenever required. Resist the temptation to check up on people too often. Show your team and colleagues that you trust them to do the best possible job with the tasks that you have set them.
“Needing to find $300k of cost savings before the budget round, we brought a procurement expert into the team who then worked with us to deliver $425k.”
10. Influencing Skills
Understanding others and tapping into their motivations to help further your own agenda lies at the heart of effective influencing. Persuading others works best when you view matters from their perspective and the best leaders spend the majority of their time thinking about their direction from the point of view of those around them.
Building close relationships, and being grateful to all involved in your dream will get you a long way. There is little more magical than understanding why someone might be interested in doing something and then seeing their eyes light up when you point it out to them. Most people walk around with tunnel vision.... expand their perspectives.
“Traditionally, the sales and marketing departments had not been close, so we did employee swaps for a three month period to appreciate a different perspective.”
8 more characteristics of a good leader
Motivation – The ability to push your people above and beyond impossible tasks.
Self-Awareness – Knowing yourself is key to understanding your impact on others.
Time Management – If you are not in charge of your day chaos will follow in your wake.
Focus – Leaders have a hundred and one priorities – deal with the ones that matter most.
Responsibility – Being a leader is the ultimate responsibility. Can you handle it?
Organization – When you have a team, you have countless spinning plates to keep in the air.
Consistency – People will trust you when you deliver on a consistent basis.
Honesty – This is rare in senior management, but if you are honest you will be followed.
Mentioning leadership skills in a cover letter
The free-flowing nature of a cover letter allows for more of a human aspect to your leadership story. While a resume is traditionally more factual, a cover letter covers more of the behavioral side.
The stories that you choose to tell should closely align with the types of leadership situations that you will face in your new role. Don’t hesitate to change your cover letter if you feel that certain types of behavior might not be common. There is nothing worse for a potential employer than reading a cover letter and thinking “Well, that sort of thing doesn’t happen here often.” Leadership skills are great if they are the right leadership skills.
Choose suitable action verbs to give your leadership stories some extra weight and make sure that you quantify your contribution as clearly as possible (at the same time as highlighting the role of those around you). True leaders don’t make it all about them.
Key Takeaways
- Leadership skills are some of the abilities that hiring managers care about the most so pay attention to where and how you include them in your application.
- The resume skills section is ironically the least effective place to show leadership skills – try backing up your achievements in the employment history section instead.
- Your cover letter allows you to go into even more detail regarding situations in which you demonstrated leadership skills.
