[xiphias2]

This is the good type of soft skill, and there is the bad type: soft skill when a person can just talk very nicely, and suck it up to his upper management, do the very simple things (like fixing all lint errors and following 30 other recommendations inside the company) instead of providing real value to the company and the users to get promoted.

I had a manager like that, and I made the mistake of confronting him for ,,safe'' and bad technical decisions (in which case the higher level person always wins), instead of just nicely switch teams without confrontation.