While Management usually the only thing equated with "soft" (hate that word beeteedubs) skills, moving up the IC ladder also requires good inter-personal skills.

Above senior you are allowed and expected to go "heads down" (by yourself or a small group) and knock out solutions to technical problems. However you are also expected to identify cross-cutting problems, rally the right people, coherently frame your arguments, etc to move the "implementing solutions to technical problems" needle (even if you don't directly write a lot of that code).

Management also get's the "fun" things like "let's talk salary!" or "you need to improve along X, Y, Z axis!" :P

Just my two cents :)