Top Basic Leadership Skills With Examples

Effective leadership is crucial in unpredictable times. What qualities constitute a good leader? Which activities demonstrate leadership? This question matters to job seekers too. Employers want resumes that demonstrate leadership skills and prove them. Leadership skill questions and answers are available to assist you apply for your ideal job.

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Want to learn more about other job-winning skills? Follow up with our dedicated guides:

• Critical Thinking Skills
• Creative Thinking Skills
• Writing Skills
• Analytical Skills
• Administrative Skills

What Are Leadership Skills?

Leadership skills are essential talents and abilities that enable managers to effectively guide teams and achieve organizational goals. A leader’s capabilities include strong interpersonal relationships, excellent communication, strategic thinking, negotiation, dispute resolution, and other comparable abilities.

Great leadership abilities enable individuals to develop in their professions, become effective managers, inspire others, and be recognized as valuable members of the organizations for which they work.

However, one does not have to be in a leadership position to display leadership skills. Taking responsibility and initiative are valued in any job, regardless of rank.

Key Leadership Skills Examples

What makes a good leader? No one answer fits everybody. While certain leadership traits are universal, others are industry- or job-specific.

We’ve compiled a list of the top skills of a leader, where each unites a general type of leadership skill with over 100 subcategories:

• People Management. Recruiting, hiring, training, mentoring, coaching, onboarding, disciplining, getting buy-in, and team building.
• Management Skills. Business knowledge, office management, finance, vendor management, policy deployment, delegating, planning, and strategic thinking.
• Collaboration Skills. Analyzing problems, brainstorming solutions, compromising, defining roles, facilitating discussion, and employee engagement.
• Decision-Making Skills. Prioritizing tasks, research, ethical decision-making, team decision-making, and consensus-building.
• Time Management. Goal setting, self-awareness, prioritization, focus, self-motivation, outsourcing, and stress management.
• Persuasion. Sales, speaking, listening, empathy, emotional intelligence, and empowerment.
• Psychological Leadership Skills. Judging character, negotiation, flexibility, motivation, persistence, and morale-building.
• Problem-Solving Skills. Perceptiveness, data gathering, fact-finding, analysis, brainstorming, research, test development, testing, and evaluation.
• Ethical Leadership Skills. Accountability, professionalism, honesty, and good judgment.
• Communication Skills. Active listening, speaking, receiving feedback, storytelling, facilitating conversations, presentation skills, and PowerPoint.
• Interpersonal Skills. Charisma, relationship building, listening, empathy, and conflict management.
• Employee Motivation. Providing rewards, recognition, giving and receiving feedback, evaluating performance, and setting expectations.
• Positive Attitude. Empathy, compassion, diplomacy, being good-natured, and self-confidence.
• Creative Thinking Skills. Lateral thinking, brainstorming, listening to ideas, and open-mindedness.
• Project Management. Lean thinking, strategic planning, scheduling, and Scrum.
• Computer Skills. MS Office, email, writing, enterprise systems, and spreadsheets.
• Supporting Employees. Listening, keeping promises, compassion, and logistics.
• Lean Thinking. Value stream mapping, kanban, poka-yoke, policy deployment, 5S, Six Sigma, inventory reduction, and setup reduction.
• Agile/Scrum. Meeting facilitation, Agile planning, enforcing rules, shielding the team, servant leadership, and removing impediments.
• Team Leadership Skills. Communication, organization, supervision, respect, influence, honesty, team support, logistics, delegation, and giving recognition.

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Ways to Improve or Develop Effective Leadership Skills

Here’s the great news: leadership is a skill that can be learned. In many ways, being a great leader means:

• Showing empathy and listening to people’s needs.
• Creating a vision and inspiring others to follow it.
• Striving to make your team’s work lives easier and encouraging people through good and bad times.

There’s a variety of resources online that can teach you how to improve your leadership skills. Here’s a list of training courses to get you started:

General Leadership Skills Courses

• Dale Carnegie
• Harvard Business School
• Coursera
• Alison
• Pryor
• Open University
• Lynda

Primarily, leadership skills are soft skills, but there are exceptions (like leadership based on data analysis or knowledge of necessary methodologies).

Technical Leadership Skills Courses

• Organizational Leadership: MIT, Coursera
• People Management: Open University, Coursera
• Operations Management: Open University, Alison
• Office Management: Study.com, Alison
• Decision Making: Open University, Coursera
• Time Management: Lynda, Skillshare
• Interpersonal Skills: Udemy, Lynda
• Coaching: Coursera, Universal Class
• Communication: Open University, Coursera
• Project Management: PMI, University of Phoenix
• Agile: Coursera, PMI
• Computer Skills: Alison, Lynda
• Lean Thinking: Lean.org, GBMP
• Nursing: NursingWorld
• Negotiation: Coursera, Harvard Business School

If you’d like to explore free leadership skills courses, there are some great YouTube videos and TED talks out there. Lynda.com will give you a free first month, too.

How to Show Strong Leadership Skills on Your Resume (With Examples)

What leadership skills would be appropriate to include on your resume? How do you choose your skills and show them to impress the hiring manager?

You could definitely go the simple approach and simply put your good leadership qualities in a different resume section, like this:

• Skills: Interpersonal skills, collaboration, PowerPoint, communication, and budgeting.

Which leadership qualities should you include on your resume? How do you choose and present your expertise to impress the hiring manager?

You could certainly go the simple approach and simply put your good leadership qualities in a different resume section, like this:

But are those the exact leadership skills your employer seeks? And is it enough to persuade the recruiting manager that you’re a good fit for the position?

Go above and above by including evidence in your resume’s bullet points. Incorporate evidence of your leadership abilities into job descriptions in the work experience section.

Need a step-by-step approach? Here’s how you find the right leadership skills for your resume:

• Scan the job ad for keywords. Decide which leadership skills the employer expects to see.
• Focus on those, and create your list around the relevant skills only.
• Show how they helped your employer by supporting those leadership skills with quantifiable achievements.

For example, if the job ad says: negotiating, training, Lean, and value stream mapping, you can use leadership experience resume examples like these:

• Negotiated key deals with vendors, resulting in 25% cost savings.
• Through Lean training across all team members, slashed inventory by 40%.
• Led team in value stream mapping drive. Cut lead times by 3 days.

Or if the job ad says: passion, accountability, and a supportive attitude, your resume should say:

• Spread passion for excellence through a 500-person team with presentations and one-on-one conversations. Cut turnover by 30%.
• Took accountability for all decisions from direct reports. When a big client asked for a rush job, my team volunteered to work the weekend to deliver.
• Supported employees with extra resources, time, and autonomy. Achieved 95% buy-in for our Kaizen efforts.

As good as hired. Each bullet has leadership traits or skills the job wants. Plus—each accomplishment brought value to the company, and there are numbers to prove it.

Based on that, when you’re choosing skills for your resume skills section, the following leadership traits would make sense:

• Integrity
• Honesty
• Ethics
• Empathy
• Confidence
• Passion
• Commitment
• Vision
• Providing support
• Accountability
• Decisiveness
• Creativity
• Empowerment
• Trustworthiness

Those leadership skills would summarize and reinforce what you said in your work experience section, making your resume strong and coherent.

Leadership Skills Examples for a Resume—Communication Skills

Does the job description need leadership communication skills? Then prove that you have them! But, which ones?

Does it need active listening? Speaking? Business storytelling? Or does it only require general written and verbal communication skills? Before you start drafting your own leadership skills CV, check out our example.

If the job ad says: giving presentations, PowerPoint, written communication, you can use the below leadership experience resume examples for your resume:

• Gave 3–5 group presentations a month to employees and clients. They were posted to YouTube. Most got 1,000–50,000 views.
• Used PowerPoint to demonstrate why we should use Trello as an office kanban system. Gained 100% buy-in. Cut delivery times for projects by 18%.
• Wrote a monthly company newsletter, quarterly reports, and two federal grants per year. Awarded an average of $50,000 annually for special projects.

Leadership Skills Examples for a Resume—Management Skills

Does your ideal career require managers to have strong leadership skills? Of course it does. But does that refer to people management or operations management? Process or project management? How about hiring, training, and delegating?

Read the job ad attentively, and then compose your bullet points as follows:

If the job post says: mentorship, office management, your resume should read:

• Hand-picked by upper management to mentor teams and managers from other departments. Facilitated a 15% increase in policy compliance.
• Managed head office with 21 staff members. Used a targeted approach to hiring, compensation, and engagement and slashed turnover by 25%.

Leadership Skills Examples for a Resume—Interpersonal Skills

Leadership soft skills are key in manager jobs. Do you have skills and qualities like charisma, active listening, and conflict management?

Great! Now make sure those stand out to the hiring manager. Sift through the job ad and find just the interpersonal skills it calls for. Then build bullet points like this:

• Elected by popular vote of 500+ employees to lead the company’s Goal Compass team. Facilitated reaching all four goals in one year.
• Resolved conflicts on the production floor by leading meetings between opposing parties. Slashed time lost to intra-term conflicts by 30%.

When possible, use exact resume keywords from the job posting. In this case, we swapped “charisma” with “popular” because it made more sense.

Leadership Skills Examples for a Resume—Team Leadership Skills

Team leadership skills impact a tight-knit group. They’re different from organizational leadership qualities that cover multiple teams.

What team leader skills does this job need? Support? Communication? Supervision? Prove them on your resume like this leadership skills resume example shows:

If the job ad says: supervision, giving recognition, your resume should say:

• Supervised a team of 7 CNC operators. Consistently hit all production targets, turning out 17% fewer defects than the plant average.
• Gave persistent, daily recognition for jobs well done. Also used monthly & quarterly recognition to gain 10% higher morale scores than the company average.

Leadership Skills Examples for a Resume—Technical Leadership Skills

Technical leadership skills are the opposite of leadership soft skills. They’re things like training, finance, data gathering, and Six Sigma.

When should you show them on your resume? When the job ad asks for them, or when they’re central to the job itself.

If the job ad says: Agile planning, fact-finding, your resume should say:

• Used Agile planning for 10 projects per year. Saved $45,000 a year in quality issues.
• Conducted 1–2 fact-finding operations per month to address quality concerns. During my tenure, customer complaints dropped by 22%.

Leadership Skills Examples for a Resume—Nursing Skills

Your nursing skills may be up there with Ann O’Brien’s. But if you don’t prove them on your resume, the hiring manager will have no idea.

Read the job ad. Does it want communication the most? Team building? Training skills? Integrity? Match your resume leadership qualities to those.

• Conducted 3 team-building events per year with 30 staff members each. Contributed to raising job satisfaction scores by 20% in 2 years.
• Led patient-care quality improvement drive. Helped raise scores on a nursing portion of the HCAHPS survey by 23%

Plus, a great cover letter that matches your resume will give you an advantage over other candidates. You can write it in our cover letter builder here. Here’s what it may look like:

Key Takeaway

Leadership skills encompass a wide range of abilities that enable an individual to influence and guide others. Good leadership skills can be developed and enhanced over time by gaining experience and investigating offline/online educational resources.

Here’s a recap of how to describe leadership skills on a resume:

• Review the different types of leadership skills.
• Read the job ad. Learn the leadership qualities that matter for this job.
• Prove your leadership skills with achievements from past jobs.
• Add numbers to your leadership skills resume phrases to show you’ve got the characteristics of a leader. Use
• dollar figures, percentages, hours saved, and numbers of people trained.