May 2021
You can utilize LinkedIn to showcase and grow your leadership skills. Below are my top five suggestions for doing so.
1) To attract more of the right opportunities, use leadership as a keyword in your Headline, About, and Skills sections. You may also use words such as: supervisor, manager, authority, director, and leader.
2) Reflect volunteer leadership roles in your profile. You can put this information in multiple places. First, if it’s professionally related, you might add it in the Experience section. Second, there is a section called Organizations that allows you to add affiliations to groups. Here you can also mention your level of membership and/or any elected positions you hold or have held. Third, you can add a Volunteering section. The biggest downside to this category is that people can’t write a recommendation for the work you list as a volunteer. For some reason, LinkedIn only allows people to tie recommendations to an entry within the Experience and Education sections.
3) An image is worth a thousand words! Make sure your profile picture is not a selfie.
Fit the part. Dress as an authentic leader. Look confident and approachable.
4) Reach out to other female leaders. Search LinkedIn using specific keywords to find women leading in other geographic locations, advocating for a similar issue, or working in the same industry.
5) If you strongly believe in a cause, add words to your profile that express this to attract people who are aligned to a similar mission. One of my colleagues adds the words Animal Advocate to her social media profile’s, so others know that is a big part of who she is.
I had one more idea, but it’s disappeared. There used to be a way to add an expression of interest to join a board of directors. I know I have seen it before, but they must have taken it away because after searching high and low, I could not find it. If you have seen it lately, please let me know where you found it.
