How To Showcase Leadership Skills On Your Resume (With Examples)

When brainstorming a list of skills that you have, you likely will think of hard skills at first. That is, skills that you have mastered to some degree through classes or on-the-job experience. Examples of hard skills include computer programming languages, foreign languages, technology skills, and other certifications.

Soft skills, on the other hand, are the intangible qualities and interpersonal abilities you possess that make you a great person to work with.

Here we’ll be discussing one soft skill in particular: leadership. We’ll cover what leadership skills are, what words to use in your skills section to highlight your leadership ability, and show you examples of different methods of including leadership skills on your resume.

Key Takeaways:

• Leadership skills include team-building, conflict resolution, decision-making, and more.

• Leadership can come in many different forms – if you’ve ever worked on a team with other people, you probably had to use some leadership skills even if you were not the formal “leader.”

• When listing leadership skills on your resume, be sure to demonstrate the skills you’ve had experience using by giving specific examples of times you faced problems and had to solve them.

What Are Leadership Skills?

Leadership skills are skills that show your capacity to lead a group to achieve a goal. Leadership styles and skills show a lot about a potential job candidate — how they can interact in a team setting, how they can communicate with others, and how they can reflect upon the project and provide constructive feedback.

Most importantly, however, a job candidate with good leadership skills is more likely to finish tasks and work well with fellow team members than those who do not possess leadership qualities.

Typically when people think of “leaders,” they often create an image in their mind about a strong-willed, enthusiastic, and incredibly charismatic person who can make a crowd follow them without a second thought. They think a good leader is the epitome of the “extrovert ideal.”

Don’t worry — leadership isn’t all about being able to stand up and transform a room. It’s also about being able to listen to the advice and ideas of others, give constructive criticism and be able to receive it, as well as being able to delegate the tasks to people with the best ability to complete them.

Here are the nuts and bolts to leadership skills on a resume:

1. Do not lie about leadership skills. Think of skills that you have demonstrated in your work/school experience and list those.

2. List skills that answer how you communicate with others, how you interact with groups of people, and any skills that point towards your leadership style.

3. List these skills in the skills section or the accomplishments section of your resume.

The Best Leadership Skills for a Resume

When looking for new employees, recruiters are looking for a well-rounded person who has the hard skills needed for the job, as well as the soft skills to be able to work seamlessly and effectively as part of the team.

While you may want to list “leadership skills” as a skill in the skills section, it isn’t the best idea to do so because saying you are a leader doesn’t show them how you are a leader.

When thinking of leadership skills, think of times when you worked in a group setting. What worked well and what didn’t? Leadership can be many things, but often, it is about how someone can effectively navigate interpersonal communication among a group to utilize the strengths of each member to achieve the goal.

To do so, a leader often possesses these main qualities that can be used on a resume.

1. Communication. Communication shows your ability to speak effectively with others. What many people miss about communication, is that communication isn’t all about you talking. Active listening is a crucial part of communication that is an incredibly important leadership skill to have.

   With great communication skills, you can build trust, express care, and clarify issues as they arise. Knowing how, when, and how often to communicate with team members requires finesse, and great leaders know how to deliver, thoughtful, impactful, and concise information to all relevant parties.

2. Decision-making. This leadership skill shows your ability to make executive order on a project when asked to make a decision. It involves weighing the pros and cons and coming up with a compromise that best suits the goal and the team.

   The buck stops somewhere, and while collaboration is key to a successful business, so is decisive action. Being a leader means being accountable for your final decisions and being comfortable being the person who makes those calls. Even if you’ve worked independently, showcasing your decision-making skills can help enliven the picture of you as a leader.

3. Conflict resolution. Not all teams work perfectly and sometimes a team is faced with a setback that is outside of their control. But when that happens, how do you deal with it? If you are able to handle stress and resolve it quickly, conflict resolution would be a great leadership skill to mention.

   Often, you’ll be asked to mediate decisions or challenges between team members or even across departments. It’s essential that you’re viewed as an impartial arbiter who makes choices based on logic, not favoritism. Portraying yourself as a resolver of disputes implies great leadership skills and potential.

4. Teamwork/Team-building. Being a leader is also being a fellow team member. Some attributes that make good team members are dependability, integrity, and decisiveness.

   Some leaders are more democratic than others, but every leader needs to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of those she manages. Team-building exercises and organic collaborative situations allow you to determine the best use for each team member.

5. Organization. As a leader, you’re expected to have a high-level, big-picture view of situations. That requires particularly good organizational skills. To manage a team, you need to know what everyone is up to and how progress is ticking along.

   Being able to communicate, make decisions, and solve problems all rely on your ability to have a clear vision. And for that, you’ll need to stay organized.

6. Delegation. Leaders can’t do everything on their own. They need to know how projects can be done both efficiently and effectively by delegating tasks to team members with the appropriate backgrounds.

   If you’ve ever assigned tasks, that’s a real-world leadership skill that employers love to see.

7. Time management. A key part of organization is time management. Your team counts on you to keep an eye on the grand scheme of things and ensure that projects finish on time.

   To that end, you need to anticipate problems and be proactive about solving them. A good leader builds enough time into their day to deal with the unexpected as it arises, while leaving enough time to manage all the rest of their daily tasks.

8. Problem-solving. Some leaders like to be super hands-on while others prefer to step back and trust their team to figure out solutions. Regardless of your style, you’re going to be called on as a problem-solver, and probably quite often.

   The ability to think through a problem logically and arrive at the optimal solution is a goal for every member of your team, but a leader has to be the one to make the final decision.

9. Flexibility. Those who panic at the first sign of an unexpected hurdle are not cut out to be leaders. Projects rarely go off without a hitch, and a leader needs to remain cool and collected when things go awry.

   Leaders also have to work with a diverse team, and that often means adjusting your leadership style or motivation strategies depending on the individual you’re dealing with.

10. Ability to teach and mentor. Not all leaders have to instruct their subordinates, but it’s a useful skill to have nonetheless. It goes hand in hand with communication, but requires additional patience and a capability for simplification.

11. Effective feedback. People count on leaders to update them on the quality of their work and your expectations of them. When someone does a great job, a good leader recognizes that and tells that person, specifically, why they’re happy with the process and/or results.

    On the flip side, leaders also need to provide constructive criticism to team members who are underperforming. You don’t want to make people feel bad about themselves — you just want to provide actionable steps toward improvement.

These skills compose the core values of leadership, but leadership is a fluid concept. There are many different types of leaders and if the more common leadership skills above don’t apply to you, there are many others to consider.

Examples of Leadership Skills on a Resume

Listing leadership skills is most often done in a bullet-point form on a resume under the skills section of the resume. Like so:

Or, if you’re doing a functional resume or choosing to provide more detail on each skill, you could do something like:

However, anyone can list these skills on a resume. What will really make you stand out as a candidate and showcase your skills in a more realistic light is by emphasizing the use of these skills when describing your roles and outcomes for each job experience.

For example:

Or even in a volunteering situation:

You may feel that you cannot sum up a leadership skill in one word and that’s perfectly fine. Many skills are best described in a few words and can be used under the skills or achievement sections of your resume.

Some common phrases include the ability to teach and mentor, relationship-building, problem-solving, positioning team members, and conflict resolution.

Final Thoughts

Describing leadership skills may seem daunting at first, but there are many different types of leadership.

If you aren’t the type to stand at the front of the room presenting and delegating tasks, don’t think that you have no leadership qualities. In fact, many good leaders are those who work in small groups and moderate discussion.

So if you are looking for different types of phrases or keywords to use to describe leadership skills on a resume, read back through the choices outlined above. Maybe some will surprise you and you’ll find you have more leadership skills than you thought.

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.