The End of the Soft Skills Era

It’s time to give soft skills the label they deserve: Relational Intelligence

Leaders are promoted into roles where they're expected to inspire, build trust,

coach others, and lead through ambiguity yet the systems around them still

emphasize functional expertise over relational effectiveness. In the middle of that gap is “soft skills” or what’s being called “soft.”

Stop minimizing what actually moves the needle

The language we use in leadership doesn’t just describe culture–it shapes it. And one term is overdue for retirement: soft skills. This is a phrase most leaders still use. It’s common, familiar and seemingly harmless. But it’s also misleading.

The capabilities that fall under this label, like emotional intelligence, adaptability, motivation, and trust-building are anything but soft. They’re some of the most difficult to develop, most vital to team performance, and most overlooked in traditional leadership development. And when we call them soft, we diminish them. We make them sound optional. We separate them from execution. We signal that they’re secondary to strategy or technical skills. And in doing so, we undermine what modern leadership actually requires.

It’s time to change the soft-skills label and the system that comes with it.

The Disconnect in Today’s Leadership Systems

The pace of change, the rise of hybrid work, and the expectations of a multigenerational workforce have reshaped what leadership needs to look like. Many leadership development models haven’t caught up.

Our Future of Leadership blueprint, High Performance Redefined: Results through Relationships, holds the data to back what’s happening across leadership systems, workplace culture, and ways of working.

Relational Intelligence: A More Accurate Name for What Drives Performance

Six months ago, our Pivotal Growth team stopped talking about, or using, the term “soft skills.” We use Relational Intelligence (RI) because it more accurately describes the capabilities that drive modern leadership outcomes. Think about a leader with IQ, EQ, AND RI. Relationship Intelligence puts leadership impact into gear.

Relational Intelligence is how leaders connect with adaptability, empathy, and influence to build trust and drive performance through strong relationships. RI includes:

• Flex Capacity: Ability and agility to effectively and broadly interact

• Empathic emotional intelligence: Ability to both understand and connect with other’s emotions

• Inspirational and motivational communication: Sparking and fueling others to their best effort and results achievement

• Engaging communications: Effectively exchanging information for mutual understanding

• Amiable Interaction Style: Interacting with emotion and curiosity to advance trust, collaboration and long-term relationships

  
  

These aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re measurable, coachable and critical to execution. Our own leadership diagnostic data confirms it. We have the capacity to re-measure these relational capabilities over time.

In our Future of Leadership study, conducted with 56 millennial leaders, we found that the top multipliers of leadership performance were all found in the Engaging Others leadership driver. They weren’t strategic or technical; they were relational.

What’s been labeled “soft” is actually the foundation of how performance happens in today’s workplace.

The Market Knows This Too

We’re not the only ones calling attention to this shift. In Fast Company, contributor André Martin wrote, “Let’s stop calling them soft. These are the hardest skills to master and they require self-awareness, vulnerability, and emotional strength.”

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Reuters recently published that businesses investing in empathy, adaptability and communication are seeing measurable gains in innovation, engagement and retention.

The shift is already happening. Leadership language is lagging behind.

Why Language Matters

You don’t invest in what you don’t value. And you don’t value what your systems don’t name, measure or prioritize.

When leadership systems treat relational capability as soft:

• It becomes harder to justify in budgets

• It gets de-scoped from development programs

• It doesn’t get tied to ROI, execution or business performance

  
  

When you reframe it as Relational Intelligence, you open the door to building it systemically through diagnostics, coaching and enablement programs that treat it as core leadership infrastructure.

Changing How You Talk About What Really Drives Performance

Leadership isn’t soft. And the capabilities that define success in today’s environment aren’t either.

The leaders who perform at the highest levels aren’t just technically strong—they’re relationally intelligent. They engage. They adapt. They inspire. And they lead teams that deliver through change.

Let’s update the language, not for branding, but for accuracy, performance, and to evolve leadership systems that value what truly drives results.

Soft skills were the roots and Relational Intelligence is the full-grown tree: visible, measurable, and where leadership impact flourishes for the long term.