# Interpersonal Qualities: What They Are and How to Prove You Have Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/interpersonal-qualities/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/interpersonal-qualities.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving professional behaviors at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Interpersonal qualities are how you listen, speak up, cooperate and earn trust at work. See the five main types, why employers value them and how to show yours. ## Key facts - Title: Interpersonal Qualities: What They Are and How to Prove You Have Them - Category: Personal Qualities - Primary skill: Professional Behaviors - Related skills: Communication, Teamwork - Primary keyword: interpersonal qualities - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/interpersonal-qualities/ ## What this page covers - Interpersonal qualities are how you listen, speak up, cooperate and earn trust at work. See the five main types, why employers value them and how to show yours. - Practical guidance for interpersonal qualities - How this topic connects to Professional Behaviors ## Detailed explanation Interpersonal qualities are the ways you deal with other people at work: how you listen, speak up, show empathy and respect, cooperate, and earn trust. They fall into two broad groups, communication and relationship-building, and despite the word "qualities," they are behaviors you can practice rather than fixed parts of your personality. That last point matters more than it first appears. When an application form asks about your interpersonal qualities, or an interviewer asks how you get along with others, it is easy to hear a question about whether you are outgoing. It is not. Listening well, keeping your word and treating people fairly have little to do with how much you talk. Once you see how the qualities divide up, it becomes much easier to tell which ones you already have, and how to prove them. ## The main types of interpersonal qualities Workplace research offers a clearer map than a list of adjectives. In their 2006 review, "Uncovering workplace interpersonal skills: A review, framework, and research agenda," Klein, DeRouin and Salas sort these behaviors into two groups. Communication skills govern how a single exchange goes. Relationship-building skills govern how a working relationship develops across weeks and months, and the review names trust, cooperation and coordination, intercultural sensitivity and service orientation among them. The split explains something many people notice without putting it into words. You can be pleasant in every conversation and still be the colleague nobody quite relies on, or be the most dependable person on a team and struggle to say what you think. Being good in conversation is only half of the picture. The five types below cover both halves. ### Communication Communication covers the moment-to-moment exchange: listening to what someone actually means, explaining your point so it lands, and saying what you need. It includes assertiveness, which means expressing your thoughts, feelings and needs openly and honestly while respecting the rights and opinions of others. Assertiveness sits between staying silent and steamrolling. Interpersonal qualities are often mistaken for simply being agreeable, but raising a concern early and respectfully is part of the set, not a break from it. ### Trust Trust is the first of the relationship-building qualities, and it cannot be shown in a single conversation. It builds across many small interactions as people learn whether you do what you said you would, whether your account of a problem matches what actually happened, and whether you speak about colleagues the same way when they are not in the room. This is why someone can communicate well and still be weak here. A polished explanation of why a deadline slipped does not replace having met the last three. ### Cooperation and coordination Cooperation and coordination are about the joint work itself rather than the talk around it: dividing tasks so they fit together, keeping others informed when your part changes, and adjusting your own plans when someone else's piece depends on them. In a group project or a team at work, this is the quality that decides whether five people produce one piece of work or five disconnected ones. Others notice it quickly, because a coordination failure usually lands on someone else's desk. ### Intercultural sensitivity Intercultural sensitivity is the ability to work well with people whose backgrounds differ from your own. It is named for culture, but the same move applies whenever a colleague was trained in a different discipline, grew up with different norms about directness, or simply approaches problems from another starting point. The practical core is to expect that they will not think the way you do, and to treat that as information rather than as a sign that they are careless or difficult. In a [diverse workplace](/knowledge/people-skills/intercultural-skills/), this quality can decide whether a disagreement stays about the work or turns personal. ### Service orientation Service orientation is attention to the needs of the people your work is for: customers and clients, but also the colleague who will use your spreadsheet or the manager who will present your summary. What sets it apart from the other types is its direction. It is not aimed at your teammates or at the conversation itself, but at whoever receives the result. In practice, it often starts with one question before you begin: what will this person do with what I give them? ## Why employers care so much Interpersonal qualities are not a soft extra listed below your qualifications. When Drew Appleby asked 39 employers which job skills mattered most in their hiring decisions, social skills came out on top. For a student or recent graduate, that means the way you work with people weighs heavily in whether you are hired at all, not only in how you fit in afterward. The weight does not disappear after the offer. A labor-market paper in the Munich Personal RePEc Archive reports that interpersonal skills have been linked to promotion, mobility and salary, and that training in them correlates with better work performance. The reason is simple: most work is done with and through other people, so the behaviors that shape a hiring decision keep shaping how a career develops. The training finding is the encouraging part. If these qualities respond to training, they are not a fixed endowment you either received or missed. ## Skills, not a personality type In everyday career language, "interpersonal qualities" and "interpersonal skills" mean the same thing: the behaviors you use to interact, cooperate and communicate with others. The word "qualities" makes them sound like character traits, settled long before your first job. They are not. They are things you do, and things you do can be improved. They also cannot be measured objectively, which means they are judged by what other people see you do, not by how you would describe yourself. Empathy is a good example of how this works. It is the ability to understand other people's mental and emotional states and to factor them into your decisions. The second half is the part that counts at work. Feeling for a stressed colleague is invisible; choosing to raise a problem with them tomorrow morning instead of at six in the evening is not. Seen this way, empathy stops being something you either have or lack and becomes something that shows up in your choices. Treating these qualities as behaviors also answers a worry new starters often carry: that fitting in at work means becoming someone else. It does not. What it does take is a period of learning how to adjust what you do to the particular people around you, and that takes time in any new team. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it like this: > I was worried about the social relationships at work — whether I would be able to settle in, and whether I could allow myself to be me. It took me a while after I started to find out that I could. There's an adjustment period where you have to find your footing, find each other, and test the waters: Where are your boundaries? Where are mine? How do we communicate? Her questions are interpersonal qualities at work in the most practical sense: noticing other people's boundaries, stating your own, and agreeing on how to talk to each other, while still being herself. Because the qualities are separate behaviors, they also develop separately. One person can be strongly empathetic and still find it hard to assert a view; another can be direct and dependable but slow to notice how a message lands. A broad label like "good with people" hides that unevenness, yet the unevenness is the useful part: it shows which qualities you can lead with and which need practice. Rather than deciding you are simply good or bad at this, you can [find your strongest skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the free Job Skills Test and start from there. ## Showing them in an application or interview Because no one can measure your interpersonal qualities directly, the people reading your application or interviewing you look for evidence. "Strong interpersonal skills" or "people person" only claims a quality. A specific situation shows it: a disagreement in a group project you helped settle, a new colleague you got up to speed, a difficult message you delivered to a customer. The five types give you a simple way to collect that evidence. For each one, look for a real situation and note three things: what was going on, what you did, and what happened as a result. - Communication: a time you raised a concern early, or asked the question others in the room were avoiding. - Trust: a commitment you kept when it would have been easy to let it slide, or a mistake you owned before anyone else found it. - Cooperation and coordination: how you fit your part of a shared piece of work to everyone else's, especially when plans changed. - Intercultural sensitivity: working with someone whose background or way of thinking differed sharply from yours, and what you changed to make it work. - Service orientation: a time you found out what a customer, user or colleague actually needed before you started, and delivered that. On a [resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/people-skills-on-resume/), put this evidence into the descriptions of what you did rather than into a separate list of adjectives. [In an interview](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/interpersonal-skills-interview/), describe the situation briefly and spend most of your time on your own actions. Claim only what you can back up with an example. A quality you cannot illustrate yet is not a failure, just a pointer to what to work on next. ## The skills that turn these qualities into habits Look back across the five types and three threads keep appearing: how you treat people, how you talk with them, and whether they can count on you over time. **Professional Behaviors** is where words like respectful, humble or considerate become something colleagues can see. It covers showing genuine interest in other people, treating everyone impartially, expressing appreciation, and steering clear of the behaviors that quietly undo a good impression: arrogance, constant negativity, or holding back from discussions you should be part of. Framed this way, your interpersonal qualities become a set of behaviors you can check yourself against, not a verdict on your personality. **Communication** carries the in-the-moment half of the picture, and it has less to do with being talkative than many people assume. Giving someone your full attention, listening actively, adapting to the other person's style and getting to your main point clearly all belong to it, and so does speaking up when keeping quiet would be easier. For a more reserved person, that is good news: much of the skill rests on attention and clarity, not on charisma. **Teamwork** is where the relationship-building qualities are tested over weeks rather than minutes. Trust in a team grows from being sincere, doing what you commit to and being authentic, and cooperation means putting the team's common purpose ahead of your own agenda and sharing what you know. It also includes disagreeing without making it personal, which is why being a good teammate is not the same as always going along. A personality label would leave you with nowhere to go; a score on a skill tells you what to practice. The free **Job Skills Test** gives you [a read you can act on](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) for each of these three, and, because they belong to **a set of twelve work skills**, for the other nine as well. Whichever comes out lowest is simply the next one to build. ## What this looks like in your own work Read back through the five types and you will likely find at least one you practice without ever having named it. If you have ever noticed that a group-project partner had gone quiet and asked them what was wrong before the deadline arrived, or taken a complaint about a coworker to that coworker instead of to everyone else, you were already practicing the behaviors these qualities are made of. The ones that are not habits yet can become habits through practice in whatever setting you are in now, whether that is a part-time job, a placement or a project team, and none of them asks you to become a different person. They also tend to carry more weight as more of your work depends on other people trusting you, which makes now a good time to see clearly where you stand. ## Your starting point You know what the qualities are and how they are judged; the remaining step is to put your own skills next to them. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve and which ones would do the most to strengthen the way you work with other people, in applications, interviews and your first months in a job. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, results shown instantly.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Interpersonal qualities are how you listen, speak up, cooperate and earn trust at work. See the five main types, why employers value them and how to show yours. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Professional Behaviors. It also relates to Communication, Teamwork. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/personal-qualities/interpersonal-qualities/ Preferred summary: "Interpersonal qualities are how you listen, speak up, cooperate and earn trust at work. See the five main types, why employers value them and how to show yours." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.