Parth brings up a very good point. Interpersonal skills are not just people skills, they are crucial communication skills that allow you to convey effective ideas to the people that you work with. In an office setting, this can be done face to face. However, if you work at a larger company or a worldwide corporation, then you may not get the opportunity to meet these people if they work at another site or in another country. I work on an international team and communicate with team members in Europe on a daily basis via email, conference calls, and Skype calls. The main challenges with this is language barriers and schedule overlap. We operate in English, but it is not that native language of my European colleagues, so it is very important to communicate clearly and concisely especially over the phone. A good way to make sure all ideas were understood is to have a designated scribe take minutes and to distribute them to all participants after the meeting, so there is a record of what was agreed upon. The other challenge is the schedule. With most of Europe six to seven hours ahead of the east coast, our schedules only overlap for half of the day (their afternoon and our morning). For this reason good interpersonal skills are important to make sure we stay productive and are not wasting time in order to keep the project moving along the projected timeline. When somebody is not communicating well with the team, it causes delays and frustration.