There's No 'I' in Team & There's No 'We' in Resume

Repeat after me, “I am allowed to speak exclusively about my achievements on my resume, even if I work in a heavily team-oriented environment.” (Repeat 3x for good measure or as often as needed ;-)

I want you to give yourself permission and freedom to focus on you within a sales document that is meant to sell only one thing, YOU. I’m starting here because I know how challenging it can feel to be self-focused for many professionals, especially those in environments where the team is clearly prioritized over the individual. The factors of humility, accuracy, & truthfulness are often at the core of my clients’ hesitation and concern in highlighting their individual contributions within their resumes. Know that these feelings and values are both valid and normal. 

While it’s good & noble to desire to reflect that your achievements took place in a team setting, here’s the challenge -- your next employer can’t hire your whole team, they can only hire YOU. For this reason, it does you no good to be overly concerned about sharing team-based accomplishments that don’t highlight your individual contribution, as they don’t make the case for why you deserve the job.

There is no ‘we’ in resume, there is only ‘ME’.

I’m not advocating being arrogant or untruthful in what you report in your resume. I am encouraging you to be the star of your own career narrative because it’s your narrative. You are the main character. You are not a supporting character or the foil. You cannot land an interview with a resume that has you faded into the background in favor of your team. It doesn’t work that way.

A recent client has a director role in the hospitality industry, which is the epitome of a team-oriented environment. He also prides himself on building very strong team culture, which he saw as the source of his company’s success. Not only was his environment team-oriented, it was also the foundation of his leadership philosophy. This was made starkly clear when he returned his resume prep document and I literally counted 24 instances of the word ‘we’ across 5 achievement stories for one role. That’s a whole lotta ‘we’ in a P&L accountable role where both success and failure land squarely on his head. Regardless of whether he was a server, host, manager, or director, his resume could not focus on the ‘we’ to the detriment of the ‘me’. So, how do we overcome this challenge?

How to Transform ‘We’ into ‘I’ on Your Resume

My #1 rule in resume writing is to tell the truth. I don’t/won’t bend it, but I will use the tools of carefully selected language, framing, & context to present a story that accurately reflects my clients’ achievements, without making it seem as though they were solely responsible for a collective win.

Start With Your Piece of the Puzzle

Within your team, you may play a specialized role and/or have ownership over a specific task or phase within a project. You are 100% justified in taking full credit for the outcomes achieved within your role’s sphere of influence or the results/deliverables of your project assignment. For example, “Identified 3 new product features that went live in update by leading requirements gathering phase for product development team.”

More broadly speaking, think about your locus of control and what results you have sole or high influence over. This is a great starting point for you to begin delineating where your achievements end and where those of your team begin. The clearer you are on the boundaries of your impact, the easier it will be for you to determine when you can take full credit, and when you need to provide framing/context around your role within a team accomplishment.

Situate Your Contribution in the Larger Context

Once you’ve demarcated your boundaries, it can be helpful to contextualize your achievement in the broader context. For example, an M&A client led the disposal (sale) of an arm of his company’s business, which facilitated the sale of his entire company, led by executives above him, to a buyer. Without his accomplishment, the larger company goal could not have been achieved, but it would have been a lie for him to take credit for the broader sale.

By contextualizing his personal achievement in relation to the bigger achievement, we were able report both on his resume in a truthful and accurate fashion, which also demonstrates how he was a key player in the company’s overall success. Where possible try make the link between your result(s) and the broader outcomes for your team/company. 

Share Credit & Mention Collaboration As Needed

There will always be instances where you truly cannot avoid mentioning others as part of your achievement. When these arise, using language such as ‘helped’, ‘supported’, ‘assisted’, ‘advised’, ‘collaborated’, & ‘partnered’, or whatever language best defines your contribution.

You can also call out your performance within a team. For example, “Played key role in pitch that won largest new account in FY2020.” You are not taking full credit, but instead, demonstrating your influence in your team’s achievement. 

Define Your Leadership Role

Leadership comes in various forms, what’s critical is that you don’t downplay your role or be more profuse in sharing credit than is necessary. If you shared leadership for a certain outcome, you can always use the “Co” prefix ahead of your action verb of choice (e.g. Co-managed, or Co-facilitated).

If you were in charge of a team that scored a big win, you don’t take sole credit for the team’s win, instead, you report on being leader + how your leadership facilitated the win. For example, “Generated 15% increase in sales by setting new territory strategy and leading 6 key accounts executives in implementation.” Doing this demonstrates your strategy, implementation, & team leadership, without saying you achieved the 15% sales increase all by your lonesome.

If you establish the practice of passing your team environment achievements through these four filters, you will be able to effectively separate results from your colleagues and produce a resume that is a pure distillation of your value in a way that is honest and true.

Ultimately, when you land a new job, do you say “we got a new job,” or “I got a new job?”

Well, if “we” aren’t getting a new job, then “we” shouldn’t be all up in your resume.

Agreed?