LISTEN TO THE NARRATED AUDIOARTICLE VERSION
“Soft skills” are for soft leaders. There. I said it.
I know... You probably didn’t expect to hear that from me. When I first typed the title for this article, I thought, “Well, this feels a bit spicy for LinkedIn!” But stay with me.
The phrase “soft skills” has always given me hives. Not because I don't value the things that people usually mean when they say it, or that I think these things are optional or less important than technical skills. It’s because this limiting language massively underplays what relational skills actually bring to and demand from a leader.
And when I refer to “soft leaders”, I mean the ones who intentionally avoid or dismiss the EQ side of their work. By sidestepping, outsourcing, or dismissing them altogether, they're choosing to leave these core leadership skills undeveloped. Which means they’re only doing half their job.
Think about it this way: by the time someone reaches a senior leadership role, technical competence is rarely the hardest part of the job anymore. Most leaders I work with are smart and capable; they know their industry, their numbers, and how to make decisions under pressure. None of that is new territory.
But what many wish they had a playbook for is 'that people stuff', as one senior VP I worked with called it. While I find that phrase rash-inducing, too, it does capture what shows up when the org chart gets taller and the culture stakes get higher.
This is relational leadership work, and it’s not soft, optional, or incidental. It’s the work of leading humans, the ongoing responsibility of building trust, regulating yourself, repairing relationships, and creating the conditions for other people to do great work.
It's things like emotional heavy lifting, relational clean up, continuous self-regulation, and the cognitive load of making consequential decisions while absorbing other people’s anxiety. It's also about holding the dynamic role tension of staying calm, decisive, compassionate, and contained, often all at once, while steadying a room, staying grounded during conflict, and repairing trust after small but consequential cracks appear.
Somehow, we’ve decided to call all of this soft skills, as if they’re a collection of fluffy, nonessential, nice little extras that we can squeeze in after the real work is done. We can't. (Unless, of course, you’ve solved the space-time continuum itself, and if you have, please call me!)
In fact, this relational work doesn't sit alongside leadership. It is the leadership work.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE WORD “SOFT”
The word soft also suggests ease, or something that comes naturally, or implies that if this stuff feels difficult, you must be overthinking it.
That framing does real damage, because the skills required to lead people well are anything but easy. Not because the behaviours themselves require some elusive talent or mysterious art, but because of what they demand in the moment: the ongoing cognitive load, the emotional containment, the internal strain of holding competing expectations while still being watched, interpreted, and responded to in real time.
Some people have strong relational instincts; others don’t. Either way, the work of leadership still requires intention, experimentation, practice, and being able to apply it deliberately, especially when the pressure is on. It takes awareness, repetition, feedback, and a willingness to stay uncomfortable long enough to grow new muscle. If anything, these are strength skills, and while some organisations do track the relational side of leadership behaviours well, many still struggle to name, measure, and invest in them with the same rigour as technical performance. Think of this gap as an opportunity, not an excuse.
WHEN THE ROLE TURNS MORE HUMAN, AND HEAVIER
I hear versions of this in coaching sessions all the time: “I honestly thought this job would be about bigger decisions and clearer priorities. I didn’t realize how much of my day would be taken up by managing emotions, including my own.”
What they’re naming isn’t a gap in competence; it’s a gap in their approach to leadership. As scope increases, complexity follows, and decisions ripple farther. Conversations carry more weight. People pay attention not just to what you decide, but to how you show up while deciding it. The work shifts from doing the job yourself to creating the conditions for other people to do their best work.
GOING SOFT ON THE HARD STUFF IS COSTLY
Let me be very clear here: finding this side of leadership hard doesn’t make someone a weak leader. But avoiding it does.
Leaders who wave off relational work as “that people stuff,” or treat emotional regulation as secondary, are putting themselves and their teams at risk.
Minimizing this work comes at a real cost. Decades of research from organisations like Gallup consistently show that poor management and low trust drive disengagement, burnout, and turnover, all of which carry measurable performance and financial consequences. When leaders avoid or downgrade this part of the role, tension lingers longer, decisions slow down, and issues that could have been addressed early become far more expensive to fix later.
This is where the phrase soft leaders actually belongs, not as a moral judgment, but as a description of what happens when leaders neglect the hardest muscles to build. When authority, intellect, or expertise do all the heavy lifting and the human side stays underdeveloped, trust erodes, performance plateaus, top talent leaves, and the leader’s credibility is damaged. Strong leadership isn’t about being nice. It’s about being able to stay present, steady, and clear when things get messy, which they inevitably do.
Doing this work well means growing your ability to sit in discomfort without rushing to fix. It means giving feedback with clarity and compassion and without shaming. And it means noticing when a relationship needs attention and addressing it before it hardens into something that will need repairs down the road.
The leaders I've seen who do this well invest in developing their people not because it feels warm and fuzzy, but because it works. They understand that performance follows trust, and trust follows consistent, regulated leadership behaviour. There’s nothing soft about that. It’s disciplined, demanding work.
THE RELIEF MANY LEADERS NEED TO HEAR
If you find this relational side of leadership exhausting, demanding, or harder than you expected, nothing has gone wrong. You’re not deficient, and you’re not failing some invisible leadership test. You’ve simply uncovered muscles that this role now requires you to build.
What you do with that discovery can vary. Some lean into the work and start building those muscles deliberately. Some minimize its importance because it feels uncomfortable or inefficient, or they don't know where to start. Others resist it outright, often because it asks for capacities that feel foreign to their innate wiring. Each response says something important about how a leader understands the role, and what they believe leadership is actually for.
Although we're seeing some improvements in corporate leadership training, the fact is that most leaders were never trained on how to grow and use their relational leadership EQ superpowers. Leadership development still tends to prioritize strategy, execution, and frameworks, while expecting leaders to learn the relational work on the fly, often while feeling exposed and underprepared.
Naming this matters. It helps you shift from interpreting the struggle as a personal weakness to simply treating it as your next leadership skill set that deserves intentional investment.
YOUR COACHING CHALLENGE
Over the next week, run a simple self-observation experiment. No fixing. No improving. Just noticing.
STEP 1: TRACK WHERE THE ENERGY GOES
At the end of each day, jot down one or two moments where the people-facing demands of the role required real effort. This might be a conversation you delayed, a meeting that drained you more than expected, or a moment where you had to regulate yourself before responding.
STEP 2: NOTICE YOUR DEFAULT MOVE
For each moment you capture, note what you did next. Did you lean in, smooth it over, push it aside, delegate it, or tell yourself it could wait? There’s no right answer here. You’re simply building awareness of your default response.
STEP 3: NAME WHAT WAS AT STAKE
Ask yourself what really mattered in that moment. Trust? Clarity? Alignment? Psychological safety? Future performance? This step helps separate discomfort from consequence.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS (JOURNAL AFTER THE WEEK)
Once you’ve observed several moments, take 15–20 minutes to reflect in writing:
Which situations consistently required the most self-regulation or emotional effort?
When I avoided, minimized, or rushed through the relational work, what did those choices cost me, the team, or the work in the short term?
What do my default responses to relational work suggest about how I currently define leadership?
What strength am I being asked to build next as a leader?
This isn’t about judging yourself. It’s about making the invisible work of leadership visible, so you can choose how deliberately you want to engage with it going forward.
If you’d like support developing this side of your leadership, reach out for a free exploratory Executive Coaching conversation at www.leslierohonczy.com.