CRM vs. normal social skills...
I think that I have developed a fairly wide panoply of social skills from living in a multi-cultural environment, but I still found CRM courses to be very useful.
The thing is, in normal social terms, I have learned how to either charm someone or else avoid them if I find them to be just terminally obnoxious. But in the cockpit of a true multi-crew aircraft I had to learn how to work with people rather than avoid them, even when they had obviously developed in rather unfortunate ways, personality-wise.
In purely social terms it can be an absolute nightmare to have to share a cockpit with someone who may pride himself on being out of step with life, so to speak. There was nothing in my background or experience that really gave me the fullest range of skills for that! We just don't need to know! I was always able to get away from people like this. Or, in a single-pilot aircraft operated with two crew, just give the troublesome one something to occupy his attention in a harmless sort of way. Sitting and brooding was a perfectly fine option in my opinion.
Then I did a CRM course, which was a real eye-opener.
We did stuff like a team exercise where one had to get a clue from each member, learning how to filter out, politely, useless stuff from the gabby one but also how to draw out the reticent one who was sitting on the key to the puzzle.
Another time we had a survival scenario where the dominant personality (an Aussie, of course!) managed to persuade everyone else but me that a trek across 20 miles of desert by night was a very good idea compared to just sitting and waiting to be rescued. The debrief on that one was fascinating.
So I wouldn't want to go overboard on the 'touchy-feely' stuff but I wouldn't want to operate with a CRM course every so often.