Poor Interpersonal Skills: What It Really Means and How to Change It

Maybe it was a line in a performance review, or the reason given when a role went to someone else: you need to work on your interpersonal skills. Poor interpersonal skills are a pattern of behavior, not a personality — everyday habits such as interrupting, half-listening, needing to be right or withdrawing, which create friction with colleagues and can quietly cost you jobs and promotions. Because they are habits, they can be learned.

The hard part is that the comment rarely tells you what you actually did. That is the place to start.

What does it mean if someone says you have poor interpersonal skills?

It means someone has noticed a pattern in how you deal with people and summed it up in a phrase that names no specific behavior. That is what makes the comment so hard to receive: it tells you there is a problem without telling you what to change. Left there, the feedback tends to go one of two ways. Either you dismiss it as unfair, or you hear it as a verdict on who you are and conclude you would have to become someone else. Neither gets you anywhere.

The more useful reading is narrower. The label almost always points to a few concrete habits that show up in particular moments: the meeting where you talked over a colleague, the conversation where your eyes stayed on your screen, the disagreement that turned personal. Moments like these can be identified, and each one can go differently next time.

How do I know if I have bad people skills?

Look for a pattern across people, not a problem with one person. Anyone can clash with a difficult colleague. But when similar friction keeps appearing with different people in different settings — conversations that go flat, colleagues who stop including you, feedback that circles the same point — the common factor is more likely your own approach than everyone else’s. The natural first reaction is to decide the others are being difficult; a pattern that repeats across many people is the signal that points back to you.

This is the most practical test there is, because interpersonal habits are largely invisible from the inside. You experience other people’s reactions — the distance, the silence, the opportunity that went elsewhere — without seeing the behavior that set them off. Two things help close that gap. One is asking two or three people you trust for a specific example of a time you came across badly. The other is to check your workplace skills in a structured way, which gives you a more precise starting point than a vague label ever will.

What are examples of poor interpersonal skills at work?

Most are ordinary, and easy to miss in yourself:

• Not being fully present: checking your phone while someone talks, or planning your reply instead of listening.
• Interrupting, or talking noticeably more than you listen.
• Needing to be right, so that every disagreement becomes a contest.
• Avoiding feedback conversations, whether you are the one giving feedback or receiving it.
• Complaining or criticizing by default, until colleagues come to expect negativity from you.
• Withdrawing: staying silent in meetings and keeping to yourself, which others easily read as a lack of interest.

None of these is a character trait. Each is a habit that happens in a specific moment, which means each can be changed in that moment. Picking out the one or two that fit you is what turns a vague verdict into something you can actually work on.

Can bad interpersonal skills cost you your job or a promotion?

They can, and the risk is highest when you are new. In a Leadership IQ study of 5,247 hiring managers across 312 organizations, 46% of new hires failed within 18 months, and the reason the managers gave most often was poor interpersonal skills. The logic is straightforward: hiring mostly screens for what you can do, while the first months in a job test how you work with people every day.

Promotion runs on the same judgment. In a VitalSmarts poll covering 1,650 promotions, 92% of respondents said poor interpersonal skills hold people back. That figure measures perception rather than outcomes, but perception is exactly what promotion decisions are made on. The encouraging side of both numbers is that they describe habits, not fixed qualities — and the earlier you notice a habit, the less time it has to harden into your reputation.

Why do people with poor people skills still get promoted?

Because strong results can carry someone a long way on their own. Al Switzler, co-author of Crucial Conversations, has noted that people with poor interpersonal skills do sometimes get promoted on results alone. But his research with VitalSmarts found that strong results combined with strong interpersonal skills is the best predictor of being respected as a leader after a promotion. Results open the door; how you treat people decides whether anyone follows you through it.

For you, that means excellent work does not cancel out an interpersonal gap. It postpones the moment the gap becomes the limiting factor, typically when your job starts to depend on other people’s cooperation rather than your own output. You do not have to choose between the two: the habits that make people want to work with you can be built alongside the work itself.

Are people skills something you’re born with, or can you learn them?

They are learned. Some people seem to handle colleagues effortlessly, but what looks like talent is usually years of practice that have made the behavior automatic. Being surrounded by people like that when you are new can make your own struggle feel strangely private. If you have felt something similar, you are far from the only one. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it to us like this:

One of the things that has surprised me is just how much the difficult parts of working life can take up mentally.

For me, a lot of those difficulties are actually social rather than purely professional. I’m thinking about things like collaborating with colleagues and communicating with clients.

Because I’m the only relatively recent graduate in my workplace, many of these things come very naturally to the people around me. They have so much experience that they may not even realize that something can be difficult in the first place.

That can make you feel quite alone with it. You can find yourself sitting there thinking, ‘Why can’t I even figure out how to write this damn email? This should be incredibly easy.’

What she describes is not a missing talent. The people around her have had years more practice, and practice is something you can build too.

There is also evidence that deliberate training makes a measurable difference. A 2019 discussion paper from the Japanese research institute RIETI, by Kaori Sato, Makiko Nakamuro and Hideo Owan, used personnel records from a Japanese manufacturer to study an interpersonal-skills training program. Taking part was significantly associated with better evaluations afterward and a higher probability of promotion. The study covers a single company, but its design is more rigorous than most workplace surveys, and it points the same way as everyday experience: people skills grow with time and effort, by watching people who handle relationships well and by getting honest input from a mentor.

How can I improve my interpersonal skills at work?

Start from the habit you identified and change it in the moments where it shows up, rather than trying to become better with people in general. A few changes are visible to colleagues almost at once:

• Summarize before you respond. Repeating back the gist of what someone said shows that you listened, and it takes away much of the friction of feeling unheard.
• Disagree about the issue, not the person. Framing a disagreement around your own view — what you see and why — instead of what the other person got wrong keeps the conversation from turning personal.
• Give your full attention. Put the screen away for the length of the conversation; it is a small signal, and people notice it.
• Let people finish. If you tend to interrupt, wait a beat after the other person stops before you start.
• Watch someone who does it well. Pick a colleague people enjoy working with, notice what they actually do in meetings and conversations, and borrow one behavior at a time.
• Ask a mentor to watch for one specific habit and tell you when it happens.

None of this requires a new personality. It requires choosing one behavior, practicing it in real conversations and checking whether it lands.

What should I do if my manager says I need to work on my interpersonal skills?

Ask for specifics, calmly and without arguing the point. Two questions do most of the work: can you give me an example of a moment when this happened, and what would you have liked me to do instead? The first turns the label into a behavior; the second gives you the alternative to practice. If the example stings, hold off on defending yourself. Make sure you understand it first, add your own view afterward, and give yourself time to reflect before you decide what to change.

Then agree on one thing you will do differently, and ask your manager to tell you in a few weeks whether they have noticed a difference. Handled this way, a vague comment becomes a specific, workable goal, and your manager sees you taking it seriously.

The skills that change how you come across

Put these answers side by side and three threads run through all of them: how you behave toward the people around you, what happens inside a single conversation, and whether you can see your own patterns at all.

Professional Behaviors is where most of the label lives. When colleagues say someone has poor interpersonal skills, they are usually describing conduct: not showing interest, complaining by default, sounding superior, going quiet, talking about people behind their backs. This skill gives you two lists to work from — the respectful behaviors that build goodwill, such as genuine interest, humility and appreciation, and the passive, aggressive, arrogant, manipulative and negative behaviors that wear it down. Most people slip into one or two without meaning to, and each can be unlearned on its own.

Communication covers the conversation itself, where much of the damage is done: interrupting, half-listening, talking too long, being blunt where tact was needed. It gives you the mechanics — full attention, active listening, keeping an eye on how long you talk, adapting to the other person’s style — and a way through the tricky moments, such as disagreeing, apologizing or handling a conflict. Every ordinary conversation is a chance to practice one piece of it.

Building Self-Awareness matters because the hardest part of this problem is that you rarely see it yourself. It means asking for specific, future-focused feedback, taking it in without defending, and noticing when a deeper belief — a need to be in control, or to be liked by everyone — is driving an overreaction. A blind spot is not a confession; it is information, and once you have it, you know which habit to start with.

You do not have to work on all of this at once, and one comment rarely shows the full picture — you are probably stronger in places than it suggests. The free Job Skills Test lets you see where you’re already strong, and which habit deserves your effort first, across twelve work skills in all.

The conversation you would replay

You may recognize a few of these habits in yourself — and, just as likely, some of their opposites: the times you listened well, or got through a disagreement without heat. Both are worth noticing. How you deal with people is not a fixed part of who you are; it is a set of habits you can adjust one at a time, and you stay yourself while you do it. A quiet person does not have to turn loud, and a direct one does not have to go vague.

As more of your work comes to run through other people, these habits count for more, which is a good reason to start while each one is still small and easy to change. If there is one conversation from the past month you would handle differently given a second chance, you already know where to begin. What helps now is a clearer picture of where you stand.

A quiet first step

All that remains is a clear look at your own starting point — something you can do on your own, in a quiet moment. The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of twelve work skills, including the three in this article: how you behave toward colleagues, how you communicate and how clearly you see your own patterns. It takes 7 minutes and shows you straight away which skills already work in your favor and which one would repay practice first.

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