“Every bullet point in your results section should have a number!” — my career consultant told me once again. Career advice articles say the same thing. Once again, I’m trying to rewrite my resume to include more business results with numbers and metrics, but each time I struggle with internal resistance.

I’m a team lead. Are these numbers really the result of my work? The result of my work is the team that achieved these numbers, and can also achieve a whole lot more.

“You need to learn to take credit for the results of your work,” says the career consultant. But I think I can. I just consider the result of my work to be the team — the fishing rod that can catch lots of different fish — but only the fish caught by a certain moment counts in a resume. I understand why this is the case — recruiters need a way to understand something about candidates at a glance and compare them, but I can’t shake the feeling that this devalues most of my work.

The Invisible Architecture of Leadership

At one of my jobs, I became the lead of a team that was supposed to launch a product with a troubled history: they were already working on its third version (the previous two turned out to be non-functional), and everyone kept postponing the MVP launch date. Conflicts around the product were multiplying, stakeholder trust was evaporating, and the team was exhausted, intimidated, and didn’t believe the project could be launched.

I did a lot of work: restored processes in the team, limited the scope of work and planned the launch, built a plan for further product development and refactoring, restored trust within the team and stakeholder trust. In the end, everything worked out — the product was launched on time, relationships with stakeholders were restored, and the team believed in itself again and became a well-coordinated value production system. I take credit for this result — I made a decisive contribution to this success, and I’m proud of what happened: the product, the team, the relationships.

But in my resume I write “Launched a product that accelerated media content creation by X percent,” and from all the volume of my work, only a pale number remains that says nothing about how much the situation actually changed, and the potential of the created system remains overlooked.

The Paradox of Measurability

Perhaps the fundamental problem is that the most important achievements of a leader are measured by completely different metrics than those used in hiring:

• The team’s ability to make unexpected breakthroughs can be assessed through the number of self-initiated experiments
• Speed of adaptation — through the time of implementing changes without micromanagement
• Culture of initiative — through the proportion of ideas coming from below
• Trust — through the frequency of escalations and autonomy in decision-making

But the hiring system is designed for other indicators: “increased conversion by 15%”, “reduced development time by 30%”, “team retention grew to 95%”. These metrics are easier to collect, faster to obtain, more convenient to compare between candidates — they’re more understandable (and easy to manipulate!). The result — the ability to create sustainable teams capable of autonomous effective work and creating new value remains invisible to recruiters.

Time Horizon Conflict

Recruiters evaluate past achievements. Leaders create future possibilities. This is not just a conflict of methodologies, but of time horizons.

A quality “fishing rod” — a team — manifests itself not at the moment of creation, but in the long term. Through the ability to cope with crises, adapt to new markets, generate ideas that no one planned. But a resume requires showing value here and now.

The Search for a New Language

I don’t want to join the chorus of voices shouting that hiring is broken — I can’t say much about hiring in general. Recruiters need tools to compare candidates, and measurable results are currently the only available method. The question is, can we create a new language for describing the systemic work of a leader?

Perhaps we need fundamentally different evaluation methods. Not “what did you do” but “how did the behavior of people around you change”. Not “what results did you achieve” but “what opportunities did you create”. Not quantitative metrics, but qualitative transformations.

As long as we evaluate the work of fishing rod masters only by the fish, we get exactly what we measure — predictable results from predictable people (sometimes this is exactly what’s needed). And measuring the value of team work for business is vitally important. I just think we’re missing a whole layer of this value because it’s in the future. And the potential for unexpected breakthroughs remains invisible.