The Hard Truth About ‘Soft’ Skills

We often refer to essential interpersonal abilities as ‘soft skills,’ implying that they are easy to acquire or optional in leadership. Emotional intelligence. Listening. Attunement. Clarity. Trust. The skills that hold cultures and teams together. And yet they’re frequently overlooked, underfunded, and undervalued.

We use language that diminishes what doesn’t dominate. We call some of the most consequential work in leadership ‘soft,’ and then wonder why our cultures struggle or why our people quietly disengage.

This isn’t just about semantics. It’s a signal of what we really value and it’s costing us more than we realise.

How We Got Here

The reason these skills got labelled “soft” is because they were feminised. Historically, they were coded as women’s work: caregiving, emotional labour, relationship maintenance, the work that holds everything together.

Our models of leadership were built on masculine-coded values: speed, scale, certainty, control, linear progress. In that frame, relational intelligence looked like a ‘nice to have’, optional, secondary to ‘real’ strategy.

But nearly 30 years in corporate leadership taught me something different. These skills aren’t feminine or masculine; they’re human. And calling them “soft” doesn’t just misname them, it creates a tax that leaders pay every single day.

The Translation Tax

Many leaders who lead with emotional clarity pay an invisible tax.

If you’re an emotionally attuned leader, you don’t just do the work of reading the room, holding the emotional tone, and sensing what’s breaking before it happens. You often have to justify it to others. Translate it. Dress up your gut-level insights into business language so they’ll land.

“I can feel the energy shifting” becomes “Based on engagement trends and retention risk indicators…”

“This person is about to quit” becomes “I’ve noticed some behavioural patterns that suggest disengagement…”

“The team doesn’t trust each other” becomes “Our collaboration metrics show some concerning gaps…”

It can take much longer to say half of what you know and each time you do it, you might trust yourself a little less.

I’ve seen leaders spend entire afternoons building business cases for things they knew in thirty seconds. Cultural interventions that were obviously needed. They could see it, feel it, knew it would work. But the response was: “Get me some case studies. Where’s the evidence? Quantify it.”

Hours finding research papers, building ROI models, creating before-and-after scenarios. Because in many organisations, data trumps emotional intelligence.

I’ve also worked with leaders who had a different experience—who could walk into their boss’s office, lay out what they were seeing, and get a decision within minutes. Not because the boss didn’t care about evidence, but because they understood that some things you know before you can prove them.

That’s less common than it should be. More often, emotionally intelligent leaders work two jobs: the actual work, and the work of translating that work into language the system will accept.

What the Translation Tax Costs Organisations

This gets expensive. When organisations don’t trust relational intelligence, they create systemic inefficiency.

Slower decision-making. When a leader sees a problem clearly but has to spend weeks building a business case before anyone will act, it creates drag. By the time you have “proof,” the problem has often grown.

Higher turnover. That attuned leader who flagged a drop in morale but was ignored? The organisation dismissed the early warning and later paid the cost in recruitment, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge walking out the door.

Meeting bloat. When you don’t trust expertise, you need more consensus-building, more stakeholder management, more alignment sessions. What could have been decided in one conversation now requires a steering committee.

Delayed interventions. Cultural problems compound. By the time engagement scores reflect what the emotionally intelligent leader sensed six months ago, you’re doing damage control, which is more expensive than prevention.

Trust erosion at scale. When leaders are consistently right but consistently ignored until the data catches up, they sometimes stop offering insights. They learn not to bother and the organisation loses its early warning system.

This isn’t about being “nicer” to emotionally intelligent leaders. This is about organisational efficiency, about preventing expensive problems instead of reacting to them after they’ve already cost you talent, time, and money.

The tax isn’t just frustrating, it diverts energy that should go into the work into defending the work.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The work is more complex now than it’s ever been.

We’re not just managing systems, tasks and productivity anymore. We’re navigating constant change, distributed teams, rapid technological shifts, and problems that don’t have clear solutions. The challenges we face now require collective intelligence.

You can’t innovate consistently without psychological safety. You can’t adapt quickly without trust. You can’t solve complex problems without people who feel safe enough to bring their incomplete thinking, their tough questions, their willingness to challenge the status quo.

Technical expertise alone won’t get you there. AI can analyse data, optimise processes, even write code but it can’t read the room or sense if a culture is under pressure. It certainly can’t build the trust that makes people willing to take risks together or hold space for the messy, non-linear work of figuring things out as a team.

The organisations that will thrive aren’t the ones with the smartest individuals. They’re the ones that can harness the intelligence of teams working together. And that requires exactly the skills we’ve been calling “soft.”

If your team doesn’t trust each other, your strategy doesn’t matter. If people don’t feel safe to speak up, you’re operating with partial information. If your culture can’t hold the tension of disagreement, you’ll never get to the breakthrough ideas.

This determines whether everything else works. And we’re still calling it ‘soft’.

“But We Already Value These Skills… Don’t We?”

You might be reading this thinking: “We value these skills. They’re in our leadership framework. We run training on emotional intelligence. We talk about psychological safety in our values.”

And maybe you do value them. In principle.

But test it out: When someone with deep people expertise tells you morale is breaking, do you trust that immediately? Or do you ask them to quantify it, survey it, prove it with data before you’ll act?

When you promote leaders, are you elevating the people who read culture accurately and build genuine trust? Or the people who present well, perform confidence, and dominate meetings?

When things go wrong, do you protect time for the repair work—the conversations that rebuild trust and the emotional processing that lets teams recover? Or does that work happen in the margins, unpaid and unnoticed, while everyone else moves on to the next thing?

The irony is that many organisations genuinely believe they value these skills and they’ve got the frameworks to prove it. What they don’t have is evidence of the translation tax their emotionally intelligent leaders are paying, because it’s invisible.

What Changes Things?

Language follows value. Value follows systems. And systems change when we decide they should.

Here’s what it looks like to value this work:

Trust the read. When a leader with deep people expertise flags a cultural issue, trust that observation without requiring a three-month research project first. You might address problems months earlier.

Resource the invisible work. If someone is consistently holding teams together, name that work and value their time for it. Recognise it as the load-bearing work it is, not as a “nice extra.”

Promote people who build trust, not just people who dominate rooms. Look at who gets elevated in your organisation. Are you rewarding the people who create the conditions for others to do their best work? Or the people who perform strategic confidence?

Create space for knowing that isn’t yet provable. Some of the most important insights can’t be backed up with case studies because they’re context-specific, emergent, intuitive. Make room for that kind of knowing. Ask: “What are you sensing?” and take the answer seriously.

Measure what matters, not just what’s easy. If you only measure outcomes you can count, you’ll miss the relational work that makes those outcomes possible. Start asking: Who made this team feel safe enough to innovate? Who held things together when everything was chaotic? Who did the invisible work?

Because these skills aren’t easy. They demand emotional regulation under pressure, the ability to repair relationships after rupture, boundaries that protect without disconnecting, and self-awareness when your ego is screaming for validation.

You can fake a spreadsheet but you cannot fake psychological safety.

You can pretend to be confident but you can’t pretend your way into trust.

You can hire someone to build your slide deck. You cannot outsource the work of holding a team’s emotional reality.

These skills determine whether your strategy lives or dies, whether your culture builds energy or drains it, whether your best people stay or leave.

They are leadership.

So let’s stop calling them soft.

And if your organisation doesn’t see that yet, that’s not a failure of the skills. That’s an opportunity to evolve the system.