# Interpersonal Soft Skills: What They Are and What They Look Like at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/interpersonal-soft-skills/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/interpersonal-soft-skills.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Interpersonal soft skills shape how you work with people. Six examples, why employers value them, how to show them in an interview, and how to build them. ## Key facts - Title: Interpersonal Soft Skills: What They Are and What They Look Like at Work - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: interpersonal soft skills - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/interpersonal-soft-skills/ ## What this page covers - Interpersonal soft skills shape how you work with people. Six examples, why employers value them, how to show them in an interview, and how to build them. - Practical guidance for interpersonal soft skills - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Interpersonal soft skills are the skills you use whenever your work runs through another person: listening, saying clearly what you mean, handling disagreement and building trust. They show up in how you communicate, work in a team, deal with your manager and conduct yourself. They are learnable behaviors, not a personality type. That last point is worth holding on to if "strong interpersonal skills" keeps appearing in job ads and feedback forms and you have privately wondered whether being good with people is something you either have or don't. It is not. And the skill employers say they want most turns out to depend far less on charm than you might expect. ## What makes a skill interpersonal Soft skills come in two broad kinds. Interpersonal skills govern how you deal with other people: how you listen, talk things through, cooperate and disagree. [Self-regulatory skills](/knowledge/people-skills/intrapersonal-skills/) govern how you manage yourself: building confidence, bouncing back from setbacks, taking criticism without losing your footing. The cleanest way to tell them apart is simple. If a skill only shows up when someone else is involved, it is interpersonal. The distinction is useful because the two kinds are built differently. You can work on confidence largely on your own, but you can only practice listening while someone is talking, and only that person can tell you whether you got it right. That is why interpersonal skills are easy to overestimate in yourself and hard to fake for long. The two kinds do meet in practice: staying constructive in a tense conversation is interpersonal, but keeping your own reaction in check while you do it draws on self-regulation. ## Why employers care about interpersonal soft skills Employers treat these skills as scarce. In a 2018 survey by Cengage, conducted with Morning Consult, of more than 650 employers and 1,500 students, 73 percent of employers said they have trouble finding workers with the soft skills they need. Interpersonal skills were named by 65 percent of employers and effective communication by 69 percent. The most sought-after skill of all was listening, at 74 percent. The scarcity has a plain explanation. A degree certifies what you know, but it says almost nothing about how you listen, cooperate or handle a disagreement. Employers can only judge those things by watching how you behave: in an interview, in a trial task, in your first months. That is why interviewers tend to ask you to describe a time you worked with someone difficult instead of asking whether you are a team player. Notice, too, what sits at the top of that list. The skill employers want most is a receptive one, not a performative one. Being the loudest or most charming person in the room is not what is being asked for. Paying close attention to other people is, and a quiet person can be every bit as good at that as an outgoing one. It is also something anyone can practice. ## Six interpersonal soft skills and what they look like at work The six below are what interpersonal skill looks like on an ordinary workday. None of them is a talent. Each is a set of things you do, which means each can be watched, practiced and improved. ### 1. Active listening Active listening goes beyond hearing the words. It means grasping what the other person means and how they feel about it, and giving them your full attention while they say it. Its most practical technique is reflective listening: briefly putting what someone has said into your own words, as in "So the real problem is the deadline, not the budget?", to show that you understood and to check that you did. That small move does two jobs at once. It tells the speaker they have been heard, and it catches misunderstandings while they are still cheap to fix, before they turn into a day spent on the wrong task. It is also the one interpersonal skill you can practice deliberately in every conversation you have, starting with the next one. ### 2. Saying clearly what you mean Listening is half of every exchange; the other half is making yourself understood. It sat just behind listening on that employer list, and in conversation it means stating your main point first, being direct and brief, and then giving your reasons, instead of building up to the point so slowly that the other person stops following. It also means speaking up. A concern you keep to yourself cannot be addressed, and a question you do not ask turns into a guess. Speaking clearly is not the same as talking a lot. Part of the skill is noticing how long you have been talking and leaving room for the other person. Part of it is adjusting to them: some colleagues want the conclusion in one sentence, while others want to hear how you got there. ### 3. Nonverbal communication Every conversation runs on two channels at once: what you say, and how you say it. Body language, eye contact and tone of voice all carry meaning, so a well-worded message can be undercut by a glance at your phone, a flat tone or a shoulder turned halfway away. For someone new, the most important nonverbal signal is visible attention. Facing the person, putting the screen aside and letting them finish before you respond all tell a colleague that what they are saying matters to you. None of it requires being expressive or animated. It requires being present, and showing it. ### 4. Empathy and perspective-taking Empathy at work means understanding where a colleague is coming from before you react. In practice it starts with checking your own assumptions. Is the colleague who pushed back on your idea being difficult, or do they know something about the client that you do not? It continues with taking their feelings seriously as well as their arguments, because a point made in frustration will rarely be settled by logic alone. This matters more than it sounds, because colleagues from other backgrounds and other disciplines often reason differently from you. Reacting on the strength of your own assumptions is the fastest way to turn an honest difference of view into friction. Asking a question first is usually the fastest way out of it. ### 5. Handling disagreement constructively Disagreement is a normal part of work, and avoiding it is not an interpersonal skill. Handling it well means steering a disagreement toward an outcome both sides can accept, rather than toward a winner and a loser. It is a composite skill that draws on listening, empathy, negotiation, compromise and clear communication all at once, which makes it the place where every other interpersonal skill gets tested under pressure. A few habits do most of the work. Keep the disagreement about the issue, not the person. Say what you disagree with and why, plainly and early, instead of letting it leak out later as complaints. And once the group has decided, back the decision even if it was not the one you argued for. Disagreeing this way is what lets people argue a decision through and still trust each other the next day. ### 6. Building trust through collaboration Collaboration rests on cooperation, on sharing responsibility and resources, and above all on trust. Trust is the part that cannot be rushed. People coordinate willingly only with colleagues they can count on to follow through, and they learn whether you are one of those people by watching what you do over weeks and months, not from what you say in a single meeting. For a new team member, that makes reliability one of the most visible interpersonal signals you send. Doing what you said you would, by when you said you would, flagging early when you cannot, sharing what you know and giving credit to the people who helped: none of it is glamorous, but it is what makes colleagues want to work with you again. ## How to show interpersonal skills in an application or interview Because employers can only judge these skills through behavior, writing "excellent interpersonal skills" on an application tells them very little. Anyone can write it, and nobody can check it. What convinces is [a specific example](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/interpersonal-skills-interview/): the situation, what you actually did, and what changed as a result. You almost certainly have the raw material already. A group project where you summed up two conflicting views so the group could choose between them is active listening. A part-time job where you calmed a frustrated customer by letting them finish before you answered is nonverbal communication and empathy at work. A team where you said early that a plan would not work, then helped deliver the version the team chose, is constructive disagreement. Name the behavior rather than the adjective, and the claim becomes evidence. ## How to get better at interpersonal skills Interpersonal skills can be learned, including by people who do not find them natural. That follows from what they are made of: observable behaviors such as paraphrasing, asking a question before reacting and following through on what you promised. Behaviors can be practiced, and practice combined with feedback is how they improve. The most effective approach is to work on one skill at a time, in conversations you are already having. Pick a single habit for a week, such as paraphrasing before you respond in meetings or putting your main point first, and then ask someone who sees you work [how it came across](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/feedback-on-communication-skills/). Trying to improve all six at once usually means improving none of them. A new job puts all of this to work at once, and it is natural to wonder whether you will fit in without having to become someone else. If that worry is yours too, it is far from unusual. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it to us 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? The questions she lists are interpersonal skills being worked out in real time. Nobody arrives already knowing how a new group of colleagues communicates. You learn it by listening, asking and adjusting, and you can do all of that while staying yourself. If you are unsure which of the six to begin with, it helps to [pinpoint where to start practicing](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than guessing at your weakest spot. ## What makes working with people get easier Look back across the six and they begin to overlap. Listening, speaking plainly and reading the room all happen in the same conversation. Disagreeing well and following through are what hold a group together over time. And underneath both sits the way you treat the people around you every day. **Communication** is where most of this becomes visible. Full attention, active listening, adapting to the other person's style and stating the main point first turn "be good with people" into specific moves you can practice, and the same skill covers the tricky moments, such as disagreeing with a colleague or apologizing when you got something wrong. It is not about being outgoing. Knowing when to stop talking is part of it. **Teamwork** is where interpersonal skill is tested hardest, because it is where people have to deliver something together. Putting the shared goal ahead of your own agenda, being sincere and reliable so trust can build, disagreeing without making it personal and committing to a decision once it is made are what make someone easy to work with over months, not just pleasant for an afternoon. It is not about keeping the peace, either: holding a teammate to a commitment is part of it too. **Professional Behaviors** cover the unwritten conduct behind every interaction: treating everyone with the same respect whatever their role, showing genuine interest, expressing appreciation, using humor with care and speaking about colleagues as if they were in the room. They also cover what quietly damages relationships, such as being passive, arrogant or constantly negative. None of this asks you to be stiff or to hide your personality. It makes cooperation easier while you stay yourself. Before an interviewer asks you for an example of any of these, it helps to know which ones you can back up. The **free Job Skills Test** rates you on all three, and on **nine more work skills** besides, so you can [see which strengths you can claim](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and which still need practice. ## What you may already be doing There is a fair chance you have used several of these six already, even if you never gave them a name. If you have ever repeated a decision back to your group before everyone left the room, or noticed that a quiet teammate had not said a word and asked for their view afterward, you have used the listening and perspective-taking that employers rank so highly. The parts that feel less natural are not a verdict on who you are. They are habits you have had little chance to rehearse, and you can build them in your own style, whether you are reserved or talkative. As more of your work comes to depend on people you cannot simply instruct, these habits carry more of the load, and every one of them can be practiced in conversations already on your calendar. The useful question now is which ones deserve your attention first. ## Find out where your interpersonal skills stand From here, one step turns all of this into something you can act on. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it rates you across twelve skills, including communication, teamwork and professional behaviors, and shows which ones you can already point to in an application and which one would make the biggest difference to work on next. ## 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 soft skills shape how you work with people. Six examples, why employers value them, how to show them in an interview, and how to build them. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Professional Behaviors. ### 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/what-are-soft-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/interpersonal-soft-skills/ Preferred summary: "Interpersonal soft skills shape how you work with people. Six examples, why employers value them, how to show them in an interview, and how to build them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.