Stop Calling Them Soft Skills. They’re Performance Skills

Leaders spend countless hours studying the numbers that determine business performance. They look at revenue, margin, productivity, market share, customer retention, and other key metrics. Those numbers matter, as they should. What leaders spend far less time examining are the human interactions that produce them.

Which is why I’ve never been comfortable with the term soft skills.

For years, we’ve grouped qualities like trust, collaboration, curiosity, communication, accountability, and emotional intelligence under the umbrella of soft skills. The label has always struck me as odd. It suggests these capabilities are somehow secondary to the “real” work of running a business, even though they often determine whether organizations achieve the very outcomes leaders seek. If anything, experience has taught me the opposite: the skills we continue to call soft often have the greatest impact on performance.

Perhaps the problem isn’t the skills themselves. It may be the way we’ve been taught to think about leadership. For the full article, click here: https://ceoworld.biz/2026/07/23/stop-calling-them-soft-skills-theyre-performance-skills/