# How Soft Skills Lead to Success: The Six That Matter Most Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-success/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-success.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving influence at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Soft skills lead to success because other people decide who gets trusted with more. Here are the six that matter most early in a career, and how to build them. ## Key facts - Title: How Soft Skills Lead to Success: The Six That Matter Most - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Influence - Related skills: Communication, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: soft skills success - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-success/ ## What this page covers - Soft skills lead to success because other people decide who gets trusted with more. Here are the six that matter most early in a career, and how to build them. - Practical guidance for soft skills success - How this topic connects to Influence ## Detailed explanation Soft skills lead to success because success at work is handed out by other people. Managers decide who gets the bigger assignments, colleagues decide whose ideas to back, and both judge by what they see you do again and again. Early in a career, six soft skills carry most of that weight: following through, teamwork, communication, initiative, perseverance and a sense of direction. If you have started to suspect that being good at the work will not be enough on its own, you are reading the situation correctly. Your competence is the base, and soft skills are what make it count. None of them is a talent you either have or lack. What helps is knowing why these six travel so well from job to job, and what each one looks like on an ordinary working day. ## How soft skills turn into success Most of what counts as success early in a career is decided by someone else. A manager chooses who gets the interesting project. A team decides whose suggestion to try. A senior colleague decides whose name to mention when an opportunity comes up. None of those people can see inside your head. They go on what you repeatedly do, and over months that adds up to a reputation. That is the route by which soft skills turn into results, and it explains a frustrating pattern: strong work delivered quietly, or delivered without much regard for the people around it, often earns less credit than it deserves. The screening starts before your first day. In NACE's Job Outlook surveys of employers, teamwork, written communication, initiative and a strong work ethic consistently rank among the attributes employers most want to see on new graduates' resumes. The logic is simple: a graduate has little work history to judge, so employers look for evidence of how that person will work with others and drive their own work. For you, that turns "soft skills" from an abstraction into a short list of behaviors you can practice and back up with examples. It is tempting to put a precise number on how much of success soft skills explain. The evidence does not support one. Innovations for Poverty Action reviewed 50 high-quality studies spanning 40 years and found limited evidence that any specific soft-skill measure predicts employment outcomes. The measures with the more consistent links were responsibility, grit, aspirations and higher-order thinking, and even those rest on a fairly small number of studies. The reason is mostly measurement: soft skills show up in behavior, in real situations, which tests and questionnaires capture poorly. So the useful question is not what share of success soft skills account for. It is which behaviors to practice. There is also a good reason to keep the list short. An analysis of 1.7 million online job vacancies, published in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's journal Oikonomics, found that most of the soft skills employers ask for are tied to particular occupations; only a small subset is in demand broadly and carries across them. If you do not yet know where your career will take you, a small, [portable core](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/transferable-soft-skills/) is where your effort pays off wherever you land. The six below are chosen with that in mind: each one matters in almost any role you could take on. ## Six soft skills behind career success ### 1. Following through on what you commit to Responsibility is one of the few soft-skill measures with a fairly consistent link to success in the labor market, and a strong work ethic sits among the attributes employers most want from graduates. Both describe the same visible thing: doing what you said you would do, by when you said you would do it. Colleagues rarely notice a single delivery, but they notice the pattern, and the pattern decides who gets trusted with something bigger. In practice, follow-through starts with small promises. Write down what you agreed to, including the date. If you can see that a deadline will slip, say so early and offer a new date, rather than letting the old one pass in silence. Doing the dull administrative parts of a job properly, and without complaint, counts too, because that is often where reliability is most visible. Over time, this is what a [well-earned reputation](/knowledge/influence/build-good-reputation-work/) is made of: consistent delivery rather than one impressive moment. ### 2. Working well in a team Teamwork is among the attributes employers most consistently look for in graduates, because almost nothing at work gets done alone and a newcomer's first test is how they fit into a group's work. Being pleasant to sit next to is not the point. The behaviors that count are doing your share, coordinating with others instead of working around them, sharing what you know, and giving the team the credit when it delivers. The harder part is disagreement. Good teams have the arguments they need to have, keep them about the issue rather than the person, and then [commit to what the group decided](/knowledge/teamwork/disagree-and-commit/), even when you argued for something else. A question worth asking on any project is where the team needs you right now, which is not always the part you would choose. People who work that way become the colleagues others want on their next project, and that is how teamwork turns into success. ### 3. Communicating so your work is seen Written communication is another attribute employers consistently screen for in graduates, and once you are hired it becomes the channel through which everyone else sees your work. A sharp analysis buried in the fourth paragraph of a long email earns little credit. The same analysis, with the main point first, gets read, used and remembered. The habits are concrete: state your main point first, be clear and brief, and choose a conversation over a written message when a topic is sensitive or complicated. Speaking up matters as much as writing. If you have a useful observation in a meeting and keep it to yourself, nobody can credit you for it. Listening is the other half. Colleagues trust people who genuinely try to understand them, and that trust is what makes your own points land. ### 4. Taking initiative Initiative is also on the list of attributes employers consistently look for in graduates, and it is one of the main routes to influence for someone new. It is how you become visible beyond the tasks you were handed. It rarely means a bold proposal in your first month. More often it means volunteering to prepare the agenda, write the summary or organize the next session; asking for a new task when yours is done; or taking on one useful thing that nobody owns yet. The worst answer to "can I take that on?" is no. Done consistently, initiative turns into a reputation. People start to associate you with the thing you took on, and they bring their questions about it to you. > In my position, I get to try things out and play around with a lot of different things. For example, I took the initiative to become a 'lean manager' — entirely on my own initiative — and now people come to me and ask about it. > > Here, it's great to ask questions and come up with suggestions for improvement. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, in words taken from our notes of the conversation rather than a recording. What she describes is the pattern in miniature: one responsibility she chose for herself, handled well, and colleagues who now come to her. ### 5. Persevering when it gets hard Grit, the habit of sticking with something difficult, is another of the soft-skill measures with a more consistent link to labor-market success, though the evidence comes from a relatively small number of studies. It matters at work because early-career success is rarely one clean run. Projects get canceled, drafts come back covered in comments, and the first attempt at something new often goes badly. Perseverance is part of building confidence, and it can be practiced like any other behavior. Break a big goal into steps small enough to start today. When something goes wrong, analyze what went wrong rather than who is to blame, then focus on the next move instead of replaying the last one. Use momentum: a run of small completions makes the next hard step easier to take. And stay realistically optimistic, which means expecting things to work out without pretending the setback did not happen. The people who keep going after a bad week are the ones still there when the opportunity comes. ### 6. Knowing what you are working toward Aspirations, having something you are aiming at, are the last of the measures with a more consistent link to success in the labor market, again on the strength of a fairly small number of studies. At the start of a career, though, a rigid five- or ten-year plan tends to work against you, because it closes you off from opportunities you cannot see yet. A more useful kind of direction has a shorter horizon: what you want to learn, try or get better at over the next six to eighteen months. That direction also has to come from you. What counts as success differs from person to person: for some it is security or status, for others the people they work with, for others the chance to express themselves through the work. Knowing which matters to you makes it easier to say yes to the right opportunities and to notice when a job is a poor fit, instead of chasing someone else's definition of success. ## How to build them on purpose Soft skills are often treated as something you either picked up growing up or did not. The evidence points the other way. A randomized trial in Bangladesh, published as a 2026 working paper, found that a one-month soft-skills training program raised participants' self-reported soft skills, and a year later their scores were still 0.13 standard deviations higher. That is a modest effect, but a durable one, which is what you would expect if these are behaviors you practice rather than traits you are born with. The everyday version is simpler than a training program. Pick one or two of the six, not all of them. Turn each into one concrete behavior you can repeat this week, such as putting the main point first in every email or volunteering for one task nobody has claimed. Then ask someone who sees your work for specific, [forward-looking feedback](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-ask-for-feedback/): not "how am I doing?" but "what should I do more of on the next project?" The hardest part is often choosing where to start, because your own view of your strengths and gaps is only partial. One honest check is to go down the list and ask which entries you could back up with a recent example. The ones you cannot are worth a closer look, and rather than guessing between them, you can take a free skills self-assessment to [find your starting point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and put your practice where it will make the biggest difference. ## What turns good work into a good reputation Look back over the six and most of them share a mechanism: they pay off through what other people come to expect of you. Three skills do a great deal of that work. **Influence** is how good work becomes trust that other people act on. For someone early in a career, it begins with a well-earned reputation, built from consistent delivery and straight talk, and from initiative: asking for the task, volunteering to set the agenda, picking up what nobody else did. It has nothing to do with office politics or persuasion tricks. The credibility comes from what you reliably do, and that credibility is what makes people back your ideas and hand you more. **Communication** is the channel through which your work becomes visible to the people who judge it. Stating the main point first, being clear and brief, speaking up when you have something useful, and listening with a genuine wish to understand are everyday behaviors rather than a separate subject to study. Choosing to talk something through instead of writing it is part of the skill too, and together these habits decide whether your contribution lands or quietly disappears. **Professional Behaviors** keep you from derailing. Capable people can stall over habits they never notice in themselves: staying passive in meetings, complaining, sounding superior, talking about colleagues behind their backs. The basics run the other way: showing respect and humility, expressing appreciation, being on time, and speaking about others as if they were in the room. None of this asks you to change who you are; a handful of behaviors simply decides whether people want to work with you. Blind spots are the tricky part, since the habit that costs you credit is usually the one you cannot see. The **free Job Skills Test** [measures all three of these](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), as part of a wider set of twelve work skills, so you can tell whether your reputation is being built by your strengths or held back by something you had not noticed. Because each skill is learnable, either answer gives you something to act on. ## Where this already shows up in your work Look at your last group project or your last few shifts at a job, and you will probably find some of these six already in it, even if you never thought of them as skills. If you have ever finished something you were proud of and then watched it pass without comment in a meeting, you have already seen the gap between good work and work that gets credited. That gap is exactly where these skills operate, and being able to name it means you already know what you are working on. None of the six is fixed, and working on them does not mean turning into someone else. You choose which ones matter most for the work you want next, and you build them in your own way. They also count for more with time: the further your work reaches beyond your own tasks, the more of your success rests on them. While the stakes are still small is a good moment to see where you stand. ## Find out which soft skills will move you forward What remains is to put names to your own strengths and gaps. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of twelve work skills, influence, communication and professional behaviors among them. In 7 minutes it shows which of your skills are already carrying your work, and which would do the most for your success if you built them 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? Soft skills lead to success because other people decide who gets trusted with more. Here are the six that matter most early in a career, and how to build them. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Influence. It also relates to Communication, 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/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.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/soft-skills-success/ Preferred summary: "Soft skills lead to success because other people decide who gets trusted with more. Here are the six that matter most early in a career, and how to build them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.