Stop calling them “soft skills”

It’s all in the craft.

There’s a phrase I hear a lot in business circles, usually delivered with a slightly apologetic shrug: “soft skills.” As in, “the technical stuff is sorted – it’s just the soft skills that are the issue.”

That word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The things we label “soft” – communication, emotional intelligence, the ability to read a room, to inspire rather than just instruct – are frequently the hardest skills to develop. And they’re almost always the reason a team either thrives or subtly falls apart.

So why do we keep treating them like an afterthought?

The problem is in the name. When we call something “soft,” we’re implicitly contrasting it with something “hard” – i.e., rigorous, measurable, serious. Hard skills have credentials attached to them. You can pass a test in them. Soft skills, by contrast, get lumped together as “people stuff” that some leaders naturally have and others don’t – which leads to a damaging assumption: that you either have them or you don’t and that can’t be changed. And that lets leaders off the hook from doing the work.

I come from a theatre background, and what struck me when I started working with corporate clients was how familiar the problems were. The same mindset blocks. The same fear of being judged. The same tendency to hide behind a role rather than show up as a full human being.

In performance, nobody calls presence a “soft skill.” These are craft skills that can be trained, practised, refined over time. They require real effort and real vulnerability. Leadership is exactly the same.

What’s Actually Hard About “Soft” Skills?

Take active listening. Not politely waiting for your turn to speak, but genuinely absorbing what someone is telling you, picking up on what they’re not saying, and responding in a way that makes them feel understood. Most of us are terrible at it – composing our response before the other person has finished, filtering what we hear through our own assumptions. Doing it well requires self-awareness, discipline, and genuine curiosity. That is not soft.

Or take giving honest feedback that actually lands, that challenges without crushing, that opens a door rather than closes one. I’ve worked with incredibly accomplished leaders who find this genuinely agonising, because it requires holding clarity, compassion, and real attunement to another person all at once.

These skills are hard. They just don’t come with a certificate you can stick on the office wall. And I think they matter now more than ever. 

In most professional environments, technical competence is table stakes. What differentiates leaders who get results isn’t usually their knowledge – it’s how they communicate it, how they bring people with them, how they handle pressure.

I see it constantly: the brilliant strategist who can’t land a message with their own team. The talented manager who loses trust because they can’t have difficult conversations. The visionary leader who kills momentum in every room because their communication style puts people on the defensive. These aren’t personality flaws. They’re skill gaps! Ones that got labelled “soft” and then deprioritised.

The good news is that these skills are genuinely learnable. I’ve watched people transform how they show up as leaders – not overnight, but lastingly. It tends to require three things.

Honesty about where you actually are. Not where you’d like to be, but where you genuinely are right now. That means getting real feedback and resisting the urge to explain it away.

Practice in uncomfortable conditions. You don’t develop communication skills by only having conversations that feel safe. Growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone, which is exactly where most leaders stop short.

Inner work alongside the outer work. How you communicate with others is almost always a reflection of how you relate to yourself. Leaders who can’t tolerate uncertainty in themselves struggle to create safety for others. The two are inseparable.

I want to suggest we retire the phrase “soft skills” altogether, because it’s undermining how seriously organisations invest in developing their people.

What if we called them what they are: human skills. Performance skills. Or – to borrow from the world I came from – craft. Something you dedicate yourself to, study and refine long after you think you’ve got it. Something serious.

The leaders I admire most bring the same rigour to how they communicate and connect as they do to strategy or financials. They understand that presence, clarity, and authentic confidence aren’t nice-to-haves, but actually vital. They’re the engine of everything else.

That’s not soft. That’s the hardest work there is.

If you’re ready to take these skills seriously, get in touch. It’s exactly what I’m here for.