How to highlight your management style on a resume Part 1

When you write a resume for a management position, your resume must reflect your particular management style. Employers are keen on identifying the management style of the individuals they hire in order for them to be a good fit with the company culture. Have you identified your management style yet?

What are management styles?

Your management style is the way you wield your authority to organize employees, allocate resources, use resources, and achieve company goals. It is the sum of all of your actions in the position, from planning out the workday to communicating with team members. Naturally, your management style reflects your personality and attitude. Management styles evolve over time. Years ago, the norm was the authoritarian management style in which managers demanded their workers obey orders. Today, management styles have changed to appeal to workers and employers alike.

The seven common management styles and how to reflect them on your resume

These are the management styles we find in the corporate world today. Identifying your management styles will help you write a better resume.

1. Top-down management style

This is also known as an autocratic or coercive management style. In the coercive management style, an authoritarian manager makes all the decisions and expects their team to simply follow instructions. This style is widely used by companies that are highly structured and govern all employee actions using detailed rules.

This management style comes in handy when handling inexperienced teams or when a company is dealing with a crisis situation. Avoid mentioning that you are an authoritarian leader upfront in your resume. Instead, lead with descriptions of achievements that highlight your decision-making skills, structured management approach, and commitment to achieving company goals. To impress an employer even further, mention how you used your management style to help the company overcome a crisis situation.

2. Engagement-focused management style

A leader with an engagement-focused management style uses different approaches and methods to direct teams. They value the input from workers and ensure that their employees are engaged with almost all aspects of the business. The workers get to share their opinions with the manager. However, you still make the final call on decisions as the manager.

Engagement-focused managers are known to maintain high employee engagement levels, and they always ensure that morale across teams is high. They have a strong rapport with the workers, which often leads to better productivity and teamwork. When you want to highlight the engagement-focused management style on your resume, mention skills such as active listening, collaboration, team building, and motivation under the skills section. Include results of achievements where you motivated your teams to achieve common goals and how you contributed to increasing the productivity of the business.

3. Democratic management style

The democratic management style allows you to build better relationships with your workers. You avoid the methods used by top-down managers and encourage your team members to be involved in the decision-making process. You believe in decentralizing authority through teams.

Democratic style management is crucial to building highly motivated and empowered teams. When you let your team members believe that they have significant ownership of their results, their performance improves drastically. You contribute greatly to increasing employee retention within the company. Focus the attention of your resume on your collaboration skills. Showcase examples of how you facilitated innovation within the business and how you created teams with high-performance rates. Your resume should mention examples of how you added value to the business by improving engagement.