Every few weeks another version of the same post goes round: master these five, or seven, or ten social skills and watch your career take off. Social skill and cognitive skill behaved as complements, each making the other more valuable, rather than as substitutes. Social skills, in this account, lower the cost of that coordination. For a support lead, a salesperson, or a manager, emotional skill is close to the core of the job. It is also worth being honest that some of what gets sold as social skill is really about power and context.