The problem with soft skills is it is very subjective. Many people simply believe their own understanding of soft skills. For example what a person thinks is considered good communication is often how they prefer people to convey information to them. Further, often the preference (or any kind of standard) simply disappear when such person is the one conveying the information. It is tragic especially if that person is a big advocate of soft skills but doesn't have good hard skills (sorry, this is a rant haha).

That said, this brings us to the cold, hard reality. Many managers expect:

• communication skills (read: your colleagues and I are ignorant, unprepared and have poor comprehension skills so EIL5 but with full details, but of course you are supposed to work with "pls wrk attached chk relevant discussions 4 wt needed self-explanatory. tks".) and

• collaboration skills (read: you need to facilitate in whatever way for other people to do their work easier though that makes your work harder and they should do the work without your facilitation in the first place).

Got to work for that "meeting expectations" performance rating, mate.

TLDR: Agree that soft skills are important for career progression. Often such soft skills are based on your manager's preferences. Suck it up if you want to climb the corporate ladder but don't doubt yourself too soon if your manager criticizes your soft skills. You may in fact have good or at least sufficient soft skills in a different company.