Soft Skills Drive Leadership Performance Harder

I read an interesting article about key attributes of business leaders that make them and the businesses they run perform successfully.  I was fairly surprised to find that one of the skills that was ranked at the top of the list is not usually considered a core business skill but more on the order of a "soft" skill.  Empathy was considered the most critical driver of performance. This is what rose to the top after interviews with 15,000 leaders from 300 organizations from 18 different countries.  In a world of tweets,emails and decreasing face-to-face conversations it may confound thinking that brevity in the business world for the sake of productivity might be a fallacy.  Here is a link to the article if you would like to read more about the research findings.
 http://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/the-science-behind-what-really-drives-performance-its-going-to-surprise-you.html