How to Include Leadership Skills in a Resume

The importance of leadership skills for resumes

Showcasing leadership qualities on your resume helps demonstrate your decision-making, authority, and confidence. This makes you an attractive candidate for many roles, especially people management positions, showing you can handle responsibility and encourage a healthy company culture.

Leadership abilities also secure you a better future career. When employers fill roles internally, they look for employees with leadership potential. Knowing how to resolve conflict or expertly manage time makes you an excellent candidate for upward movement.

Much like management skills, these skills are helpful for most professionals. While leadership skills are primarily useful for managers and executives, many job positions benefit from them. For example, customer service agents must use active listening, communication, and conflict resolution to properly de-escalate a situation with a frustrated customer.

The 5 top leadership skills

Let’s take a look at a few leadership examples for resumes. Employers search for these essential skills and competencies to ensure the future of their businesses and support their employees.

Note that most of them are soft skills. This makes it simple for leaders in any industry to study this list and not worry about anything role-specific getting in the way.

Communication

A capable leader must communicate their intentions and understand others. Communication skills like active listening, persuasion, negotiation, and nonverbal language are vital.

For example, a sales team leader must clearly communicate quotas and listen to feedback when talking to their team, and negotiate new ideas and gain acceptance from executives.

Delegation 

Delegating tasks and responsibilities to employees requires strategic thinking and a keen awareness of employee strengths and weaknesses. This is also often done in urgent situations, so leaders must know how to delegate under pressure.

For instance, a project manager has a key teammate drop out sick during a critical project. Keeping a calm attitude, the manager delegates the team members’ tasks to other workers with similar strengths, maintaining motivation and avoiding project delays.

Problem-solving

Companies need leaders with cool heads who can identify problems, analyze them, and find innovative solutions. 

Let’s say an HR manager notices a drop in employee engagement. They use critical thinking to analyze when it started trending downward to discover the possible root cause and then send out an employee survey to gather opinions.

Relationship management

Leaders are almost always people managers, so managing relationships is vital. These professionals must build trust, prevent and resolve conflict, maintain motivation, and mentor employees.

An example is a manager who discovers a dispute between teammates and steps in to mediate. They listen to both arguments and empathize with both parties before finding a solution that benefits the larger organization.

Decision-making

Organizations go through difficult decisions every day, so leadership must keep calm, analyze the best choice for the business, and be confident in their decision.

Let’s say an executive must decide whether or not to fund a construction project. They need to speak to their leadership team, review the total budget, and speak to a financial advisor.

How to include leadership skills across your application

To start, include leadership skills in the Skills section of your resume. List five to 10 skills and include a mix of hard skills and leadership qualities like decision-making and critical thinking.

However, you can take it a step further and incorporate these qualities throughout your entire application. Catch the hiring manager’s eye immediately by adding leadership competencies to your resume summary. Don’t state it plainly – work it into the narrative naturally. Here’s an example:

This shows employers your capabilities rather than just telling them.

You can also mention your leadership skills in your cover letter, work experience, and education using this method. With the right resume template, you can add optional sections, like volunteer work, to further reinforce your leadership qualities.

How to showcase leadership skills through experience

A leadership experience resume is the most powerful way to show these qualities. Detailing specific examples in your work experience section showcases your leadership skills in real situations rather than simply telling the hiring manager you have them.

If done right, this tactic also subtly displays your hard skills, like computer literacy and planning, which are also leadership abilities.

Here are a few tips on displaying leadership qualities through experience:

Use action verbs

Action verbs express your experience in an exciting, engaging way, highlighting your skills and accomplishments. These verbs describe your achievements concisely, make them look attractive, and help catch the hiring manager’s eye. They also relay a confident, authoritative tone.

Some common resume action verbs include:

• Achieved
• Accelerated
• Discovered 
• Completed
• Led
• Coordinated
• Demonstrated
• Developed
• Taught
• Planned
• Directed

Use these verbs at the beginning of each work experience bullet point for the best effect. For example: “Led a team of 10 editors to create exceptional content, leading to a 20% increase in client satisfaction.”

Quantify achievements

Use measurable metrics wherever possible when describing your experience. This puts tangible outcomes behind your claims and gives recruiters real context. Simply listing responsibilities doesn’t tell the employer much, but adding numbers and metrics helps them understand your impact.

Here’s an example of quantified achievements vs. standard responsibilities:

• Standard responsibilities: “Answered customer calls, provided information, and resolved issues.”
• Quantified achievements: “Answered 50 calls per day, providing detailed information and resolving customer issues, leading to a 10% increase in customer satisfaction according to surveys.”

Use the STAR method

The STAR method is a framework for describing your qualifications that you can use for resumes and interviews. The acronym stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result, and conveys how you present your experience to employers.

Essentially, you provide details and context about your accomplishments by describing the Situation you were in, the Task you had to solve, the Action you took, and the Result you had on the event and the company.

This method is especially great for detailing leadership skills on a resume, as it allows you to dive into an achievement in-depth, discussing the teammates you helped or a project you saved.

Tailor leadership skills to the role

Unfortunately, resumes should never be “one and done.” It sounds easy to make one resume and send it out to every open role, but this doesn’t provide the relevance that hiring managers need.

Customize each resume to match the job position you’re targeting. Carefully read the job description to find the skills and qualifications the employer is looking for and weave them throughout your resume.

For example, a job description may ask for a strong decision-maker who knows how to make business judgments in urgent situations. This would be a great opportunity to mention the time you had to decide what to do with a struggling employee, and your decision led to an increase in employee performance.

This tactic allows you to subtly show your expertise and relevance to the role while also making your resume ATS-friendly.

For more examples of how to tailor a resume, read our resume samples.

“Detailing specific examples in your work experience section showcases your leadership skills in real situations rather than simply telling the hiring manager you have them.”

Emphasize keen leadership skills in your resume

Leadership skills are in high demand, and you must show employers you have just what they need. Follow our tips to build a leadership skills resume that lands you your dream role:

• Convey your authority and confidence with action verbs
• Quantify achievements to showcase your impact on a company
• Use the STAR method to describe your accomplishments accurately
• Tailor resumes to each application to make them relevant and ATS-friendly

Show companies you’re a capable leader by using these tips today. Head to CVwizard’s resume builder to create a professional resume in minutes.