Leadership has many facets that include having a vision, implementing plans and programs, managing, influencing and motivating others, ensuring the financial health and sustainability of your organization and building strategic partnerships/relationships. Communicating these abilities on your resume or LinkedIn profile requires thought.

You might start by:

Defining the features of leadership that are most important to your career;
Listing them all in your “Executive Profile” or keyword descriptions; and
Including numbers and/or other success indicators in your listing and descriptions.
Over the years, I have used this simple formula with great success.

This formula ensures that you cover both the theoretical and practical aspects of leadership.
Its simplicity makes it user-friendly and easy to apply to a variety of formats.

For example, if you determine that vision, strategic implementation and fundraising capacity are worth mentioning, you would include bullets that state:

Led strategic planning process for a $15M start-up;
Recruited, trained and delegated outreach functions to the staff of 12; and
Generated $3.5M in donations and pledges during the first year.

Each bullet describes a key quality in clear, concise language and includes some numbers for reference. Read together, the bullets demonstrate that you create the vision and execute the plan to accomplish the task.

A second step would be to update the LinkedIn or other online summaries to include these details. Typically, social media entries need to be even more concise. So, you might contract the bullets to keywords such as “strategic planning,” “outreach/marketing,” “fundraising,” to get similar points across. A third step might be to get people who know your performance well to write recommendations on LinkedIn specifying these defined qualities. That way, you begin to brand yourself consistently across all platforms, emphasizing those skills and attributes that will make you marketable.

Karen Alphonse is ExecSearches.com’s Search Solution Leader and Executive Coach. Learn more about our resume writing and executive coaching services.

Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 11:12 pm