How To Say You Lead a Team on Your Resume

Recruiter-backed resume examples, bullet points, phrases, tips, and tricks you can use to make your team leader resume stand out.

2 years ago • 6 min read

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Leading a team is a significant accomplishment that should be on your resume — especially if you’re applying for more senior positions or jobs that require leadership experience.

But how do you specifically state that you led a team on your resume? How do you navigate resume accomplishments when they were a group effort? And what if you’re ready to step up and lead a team for the first time?

We answer all those questions — and others — below. But first, here’s a quick-start guide on how to put leading a team on your resume.

How to highlight that you led a team on your resume

  1. Analyze the Job Description: Dive into the job description to identify what type of team leadership qualities the position demands.
  2. Align Your Achievements: Highlight accomplishments that resonate with the leadership responsibilities mentioned in the job description.
  3. Clarify Your Job Title: Opt for a title that unequivocally indicates your role in leading a team.
  4. Spotlight Leadership Accomplishments: When writing your work experience bullet points, prioritize achievements that showcase your leadership qualities with quantifiable results, such as projects you steered to completion ahead of schedule or instances where your leadership led to a significant increase in team productivity.
  5. Leverage the Resume Summary: Consider encapsulating your team leadership experiences in the resume summary for greater visibility.

What to do if you don’t have much leadership experience

If you don’t have direct experience leading a team, don’t worry — simply choose accomplishments that demonstrate soft skills like teamwork and leadership. Use our keywords finder to make sure you haven’t left out key skills and get personalized feedback by uploading your resume to an ATS resume scanner.

Do hiring managers prefer the term 'team lead' or 'team leader' on a resume?

The terms are frequently used interchangeably. Nonetheless, it’s best to use whatever term is included in the job posting.

Where to put team leadership on your resume

In your work experience bullet points

The best place to put important information in your resume is in your work experience section. Use your bullet points to highlight accomplishments related to leading a team. Make sure to include metrics like the size of the team you led, what type of leadership you provided (e.g. supervision, mentoring, project management, performance monitoring, and feedback), and any key successes.

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In your job title

If your job title was “Team Lead,” that makes things pretty easy. But what about times when it’s not immediately clear from your job title that you held a leadership role?

DO:

DON’T:

Include roles where you held a job title like “team lead” on your resume

In your resume summary

If you’re applying for roles where leading a team is one of the key responsibilities, make sure your leadership experience isn’t overlooked. To really emphasize your background in leading a team, put it in your resume summary at the top of the page.

Use your resume summary to emphasize that you led a team on your resume

Synonyms for “led a team” on a resume

There are only so many ways you can put “led a team …” on a resume — and only so many times a hiring manager wants to read it! To avoid too much repetition, here are some examples of how to say you managed a team on your resume:

Action Verbs

Phrases

Resume bullet point examples for leading a team

To give you a head start in crafting your own bullet points, here are some industry-specific examples of leading a team you can use to fit any resume — including if you’re just starting out or applying for your first team leadership position.

Not all teams are created equal. If you led an international team or one with a large budget, highlight those elements by using numbers — even a rough estimate is fine.

If you led a team as a project manager or product owner, focus on what you did in your role to affect the team’s performance, like introducing new processes or creating guidance documents.

Leading a team of internal staff isn’t quite the same as bringing people in from outside. If you led a team of consultants or external stakeholders, use that to emphasize soft skills like negotiation and organization.

If you led a sales or customer service team, you can include sales metrics or lead generation from the team as a whole — as long as you clearly state what actions of yours led to those results.

The same principle applies if you led a team of engineers, software developers, or any field with a team-based output. Accomplishments that belong to your team as a whole can definitely go on your resume, but be prepared to speak to what you did as the team leader to get those results.

If you led a team on a specific project, you can still include that as evidence of team leadership. Include as many details about the project as you can in 1-2 lines, including its scope, purpose, and how many people were involved.

If you haven’t led a team yet but are applying for team leadership positions, include teamwork-based accomplishments that highlight your productivity in a team environment and ability to work well with others.

Team leader resume examples

To help you visualize the perfect team leader resume, let's explore some examples. Whether you're in sales, IT, or engineering, tailoring your resume to your field is crucial.