Last updated: 14th Nov 2024
If you’re applying for a job that requires managing people, the recruiter will want evidence that you’ve managed teams effectively in previous roles — or that you’re capable and ready to take on team leader responsibilities.
Discover how to ensure the team management skills on your resume make hiring managers sit up and take notice.
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Why Do Recruiters Care About How You Managed A Team?
Hiring managers will be more impressed by a candidate who can show they can successfully unite, motivate and develop people to aid in the pursuit of results.
Good team managers can:
- Get more done with fewer resources by improving coordination and processes, wisely allocating work, and maintaining the right focus, which helps maximise efficiency and impact.
- Increase employee engagement by creating the right conditions for open communication, camaraderie, meaningful collaboration, and effective problem-solving and conflict resolution.
- Help people grow by working with employees to set achievable goals, offering development opportunities, and directly coaching and training others to expand their technical skills.
It’s important to recognise that management and leadership are different skill sets — although they often overlap.
The difference is that team management is focused on the practical measures needed to mobilise a group of people to achieve a goal, which can be a daily task list, a project outcome, or a long-term strategic objective.
Team management is less lofty, forward-looking or entrepreneurial than leadership, but just as vital.
Without well-managed on-the-ground progress, vision and mission statements can’t be realised.
(Related: How To Sell Your Leadership Skills On Your Resume.)
Which Team Management Skills Belong On Your Resume?
You don’t need to have had direct reports to gain team management experience.
You may have directed others’ work through the delivery of events, small projects, brainstorming or planning activities. Perhaps you’ve managed teams as a volunteer or member of a sporting or social club.
Think about instances where you’ve:
- Created an effective team by identifying the best people to involve, onboarding them, and distributing tasks fairly based on insights into people’s capacity and strengths.
- Organised people and kept them accountable through your approach to scheduling, time management, providing feedback and clear and regular communication.
- Advocated for your team by making a case for changes to senior leaders, championing initiatives through employee communications, or delivering reward and recognition events.
- Improved team performance through better resource allocation, analysing data, delivering training/coaching, or making process improvements.
- Nurtured relationships across a group through rapport-building activities, which could include a group of employees, peers, clients/customers or industry stakeholders.
- Applied your emotional intelligence to understand and empathise with team members to work through problems, overcome disengagement, or inform decisions.
- Resolved conflicts and initiated difficult conversations to overcome roadblocks, negotiated tough deals, or mediated stakeholder disputes to keep projects on track.
- Gained the respect of a group by taking on responsibility, leading by example, asking for feedback and listening, addressing a complex issue or making a hard choice.
Important!
Team management can only be considered effective if it’s sustainable and people don’t burnout or quit under the pressure of delivering results. Brainstorm examples of how your management approach has built a thriving team culture with healthy work-life boundaries.
Team management comprises a variety of hard and soft skills, and recruiters will expect you to talk about both. For example you might have applied:
- Hard skills such as know-how of software and digital systems, project management, recruitment, training, report writing, public speaking, data analytics, and budget management.
- Soft skills such as leadership, decision-making, adaptability, creativity, critical thinking, time management, empathy, confidence, resilience, delegation and team-building capabilities.
Technical skills may be explicitly mentioned in job ads for team manager roles, but a lack of interpersonal skill is often what will hold you back from being shortlisted.
Example 1:
If you’re applying for a position that involves managing a team of customer service agents, the employer might want reassurance that you can use monitoring software to analyse call handling times:
Example 2:
If you’re crafting a resume for a team leader in a SaaS company with a remote work model, the recruiter might want to see that you’re fluent in asynchronous management techniques:
Lean on the transferable skills you possess. For instance, digital literacy, flexibility and analytical thinking may be more important than knowledge of a specific tech platform.
How To Describe Team Management Skills Through Examples.
You can showcase management skills throughout your resume:
- Objective, summary or profile section: Don’t just say you’ve supervised people, call out specific attributes you possess that translate to strong people management.
- Skills section: List relevant technical skills and other capabilities connected to managing a team to drive performance improvement.
- Work experience section: Select examples of your achievements in each role that focus on how your team management skills delivered a quantifiable benefit to the company.
- Education or professional development section: Add courses, training or mentoring activities you’ve pursued that have honed your management skills.
You can include details of the scope of your team management responsibilities — such as the number of people you managed, or if it was a national or global team — but always emphasise how you applied your skills to deliver a desirable outcome.
Example:
Cite specific figures, revenue and productivity gains, or benefits to the organisation, rather than simply describing the work undertaken.
Important!
Responsibilities don’t impress the way the tangible outcomes do.
Here are some impressive examples of team management that different types of professionals could showcase:
| Role | Example of Team Management Skills |
|---|---|
| General Manager | Assembled a cross-functional team to streamline the company-wide annual reporting process, through business process analysis, slashing the timeframe by two weeks. |
| Marketing Manager | Oversaw an AI assistant trial across the six-person marketing function, using one-on-one coaching to overcome concerns and increase adoption, resulting in a time saving of 7 hours each week. |
| HR Executive | Spearheaded a project to introduce a self-serve portal for leave requests and approvals based on employee survey feedback, reducing enquiries to HR by 40%. |
| Sales Team Leader | Initiated a weekly peer-to-peer training session to share learnings from customer wins, which contributed to a 10% lift in average transaction value across the team. |
| Retail Team Leader | Onboarded 10 temporary team members during the holiday season, using staggered shifts and job shadowing to avoid overworking current staff, ensuring no drop in productivity or service quality. |
Include powerful action verbs in the phrases you use to describe your team management achievements, such as:
- Managed
- Lead
- Spearheaded
- Directed
- Guided
- Supervised
- Implemented
- Assigned
- Mentored
- Trained
- Delegated
- Facilitated
- Optimised
- Oversaw
- Coordinated
Show Employers You Can Manage Their Team.
Teams come in a variety of structures and sizes. As you update your resume, consider the team you’re hoping to join and what the employer needs to get the most out of them.
Refining your resume often takes some research into the company and the context in which it operates, so that your examples line up with the recruiter’s perspective. Showcase team management skills that are relevant to:
- What the job poster asked for in their ad or job description.
- Talent challenges present in a particular industry or role.
- The managerial ethos or business model of the employer.
If you’re struggling to narrow down your examples, or describe your skills in a way that makes them unique to you, consider getting professional help from Arielle Executive’s expert resume writing team.
Jody
