Personally, I hate the description “soft skills” – it implies that soft skills are easier or less important than hard skills.

In fact, I think the exact opposite is true. Having empathy, understanding, and being able to relate to and communicate with those around you as human beings can be difficult – but that ability is essential.

Soft skills may be challenging but ultimately really rewarding for a new leader to focus on as his or her business grows. It pays off – that’s how most problems in a business are solved and progress is made.

It’s the coordination and communication of the people involved – the successful implementation of team engagement – that moves the business forward.

Some jobs do rely more on hard skills – jobs that don’t involve much management or interaction with other people as a leader does, and so performing well at these jobs relies more on the “hard skills” than soft ones. Being successful as a freelance coder usually depends more on technical ability, although you still need enough interpersonal skills to minimally work with others.

But being a manager, a leader, coordinating a group of people towards a common goal requires “soft skills.” Each team member, each investor, customer – really, each human being – has different values, demands, interests and limitations. And as we work together, not only solving problems but figuring out what the actual issues are, being able to understand, relate and communicate with people is an essential part of being successful in business.

So you can’t improve your business by only by developing or improving hard skills won’t make you a better leader, and it won’t make your team more productive or engaged.

But consistently working on and improving soft skills will, and it is a practice that delivers massive returns.