Competency outline: Leadership

What is leadership, and is it something you should be seeking to demonstrate in your resume? Of all the competencies, leadership is among the hardest to demonstrate; yet it is also among the most valuable for employers. Every business needs leaders and followers, ideally more of the latter. But leadership can exist at many levels - it is not something that is the exclusive preserve of the CEO. 

To my mind, the key to good leadership is the ability to identify and focus on a task on which a team must deliver; and then to instruct, manage, guide, and above all inspire that team to achieve the goal. Good leadership rarely comes from simply inspiring fear, although that can play a part. The best leaders are those whom others want to follow and for whom they will put in more effort than their simple job description requires; they are the individuals from whom words of praise are as valuable as financial recompense; leaders demonstrate by example: they should not expect any member of their team to do something they are not prepared to do themselves.

Look to the work that you do, to your achievements: you may not think of yourself as a leader, yet find that you have displayed leadership in unexpected places - through voluntary work, or in your out of work pastimes perhaps. Just because such leadership is not work related does not mean that employers will be unimpressed by it. If you can be a leader out of work, you can lead in work also, and employers value that.