5 Essential Leadership Skills Employers Are Looking For

Strong leadership skills are hugely beneficial in the workplace, particularly in today’s fast-paced and competitive working environment. From executives to senior management, these skills can be applied across a range of positions and responsibilities.

They can be used to increase productivity, boost morale, inspire innovation, and help solve problems. What’s more, with companies striving to increase visibility and adapt to ever-changing markets and consumer demands, strong leaders could give them a competitive edge.

As a result, employers will always be on the lookout for candidates that possess these important skills.

With that in mind, you need to know how to effectively showcase these skills on your resume. To help you do that and to increase your chances of securing an interview, we’ve created this list of the five essential leadership skills top employers are looking for.

Here’s why you need to highlight these on your application and how to do just that.

1. Communication

Almost half of employers (45.2%) agree that communication is the most important quality in a good leader. This encompasses several key skills, including speaking, listening, writing, and visual communication. These are all critical skills in the workplace and there are a number of reasons for this.

Communication is vital for ensuring that employees have the information they need, and for setting out goals, projects, and workloads. It’s also important for building relationships with colleagues and customers, listening to one another, and encouraging teamwork.

Not only this, but without clear communication there is room for mistakes and misunderstandings.

This is why it is crucial that you showcase your communication skills on your resume and highlight your key achievements in this area.

You should quantify these skills wherever possible for maximum impact. For example, ‘oversaw projects between the sales and marketing departments, helping them to develop an advertising strategy that increased sales by 25% in the first 6 months’.

2. Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills are used to form and maintain meaningful relationships in the workplace. For the most part, this means building healthy relationships with your team and your colleagues, but these skills can also be applied when dealing with customers and clients.

Interpersonal skills are the different qualities that you may use on a daily basis to communicate with others. These encompass lots of skills crucial for leadership, including active listening, teamwork, persuasion, collaboration, and conflict resolution.

As there are lots of key qualities involved here and they can help to boost your application, it’s a good idea to give a few examples that highlight this important skill set.

3. Problem-solving

Problem-solving is a key skill for most roles, but when you’re in a position of leadership, it’s even more critical. As an effective leader, you need to be able to carefully assess different situations to determine the best course of action.

What’s more, as well as tackling your own daily challenges, you may also be responsible for helping your reports or colleagues to solve their own issues. When leaders confidently and frequently solve problems, their teams are likely to build more trust in them and feel more confident turning to them in a crisis.

So, when including this skill in your application, make sure to go into more detail than simply stating ‘problem-solving’. Be sure to give examples of how you’ve tackled problems in the past and the impact this had on the team and business as a whole.

4. Decision-making

Leaders need to be decisive and they need to be able to make smart decisions that are going to positively impact the business. Sometimes, this means making a decision under pressure.

Being skilled at making decisions shows confidence and responsibility, and an ability to weigh up the information provided and take action, even if this means taking a calculated risk. But more than this, being a leader is not just about making decisions yourself, but supporting and guiding the team or junior employees when they are making decisions too.

Showcasing these skills on your resume can be tricky, so it’s best to provide real-world examples of how you’ve made critical decisions in past roles and the value you were able to add to the business as a result.

5. Delegation

Last but not least we have delegation. When you’re in a position of leadership, it’s impossible to do everything yourself. Therefore, being able to show effective delegation skills is something that employers will look for on your resume.

Plus, the ability to assign tasks to your team and colleagues based on capability shows that you can identify who is best suited to tackling tasks and projects.

Not only that but delegation is vital for time management, another important skill that employers will look for in a good candidate. So you can actually demonstrate several key transferable skills.

Sure, there are lots of other skills you can highlight on your resume, but including these five important skills and highlighting your achievements can increase your chances of impressing the recruiter and securing an interview.