Hollywood is chock full of stereotypical career-oriented men and women. They’re usually very intelligent, good-looking, sociable, emotionally stable, well-off, and fashionable. They can balance their time between their perfect family and dream job, do several things at once, and do multitasking to fit 36 hours’ work into a single day.

But you know that you’re probably not that kind of person. Heck, nobody’s that kind of person. Sure, you’re intelligent to some degree and possess a mix of the characteristics above, but you’re probably nowhere near any definition of ‘perfect.’ The image of a perfect employee might get you up the company ladder the fastest, but using a bit of your social skills ranks right up there with it.

The Pros of PR

Many of the most successful people in the world are probably intelligent, but you can bet that they didn’t get to their current stature using only intelligence. A person’s social skills very often contribute a lot to that person’s success in life. Finding the right connections, building the right relationships, and making friends in the right places might sound a bit unscrupulous to you, but they’re very legitimate business practices.

Business and employment is all about a give-and-take relationship between provider and client, so it’s no wonder that social skills can play a big part in both. Maximizing your connections for your success can range anywhere from getting a friendly tip about which job to get to asking for favorable feedback for promotion. It won’t do your career any good, even if you’re really intelligent, if you’re not sociable to your superiors, your coworkers, and your subordinates.

Gaining with a Group

Another big reason why sociability is effectively required in building your career is that you’ll most probably end up working with a team or group. Many of the projects and tasks you’ll encounter along the way are probably too large for you, so you’ll have to join or form a group to tackle it. If the other members of that group aren’t even on friendly speaking terms with you, it’ll be a wonder if the project you’re working on will take off. Whether you’re leading the group or working along with it, you will have to bring out some of those social skills to make your methods more efficient and your work easier.

If you thought that socialization was only for those with too many words to say and too much time to spend, you were under a very big misconception. Because you’ll obviously be encountering a lot of other people in the workplace, your social skills become an important factor in the speed of your progress. That is, if you didn’t think they were important in the first place.