If you want to get ahead, writing will not get you very far. I'm not saying that the skill isn't important, but it's down toward the middle of the list in terms of importance. Most managers are average to terrible writers. And yet at the same time, they invariably tend to be better than average verbal communicators, because being able to connect on a social level is vastly more important than being able to connect through prose. You don't have to trust me on this, just look at how political elections are won. Candidates don't submit long articles to the press that support their positions, they get up on a stage and attempt to connect with crowds on an emotional level. It's no different in business. Senior management wants to have managers who can verbally motivate their employees with a short chat and a pat on the back instead of some essay.
That may be true if you see getting ahead as meaning becoming an ever more senior manager. I do agree that social and verbal skills (and political) skills are important there.
My own verbal and political skills aren't great. I am not a manager! Writing well has been good for me personally in terms of being able to organise my own thoughts better, and to be succinct in a way I can't when I speak.
I find my opinion is consulted frequently partly because I can summarise complex issues and present it in a way others can work with.
I'd be pretty surprised if good verbal communicators aren't usually good writers. I think politicians persuade people not by the clarity, conciseness, or coherence of their speech, but by the substance of their speech. If communication itself could be abstracted from the substance of what is communicated, then it wouldn't be true I think to attribute the success of certain politicians to their ability to communicate so much as their ability to choose what to communicate.
A writer has to be interesting though, every piece of writing we consider well written has a quality of gripping the mind. I'd argue then, that politicians though they may not be in the habit of writing long academic style treatises or "interesting" articles, perhaps it can be argued in the past they largely did, still if they are in part elected on the basis of their speech, must possess the same ability in writing.
If you don't believe me then how is it that Trump's tweets are works of art, "I have never seen a think person drinking Diet Coke,"The Coca Cola company is not happy with me--that's okay, I'll still keep drinking that garbage.", etc... Crude, in bad taste, whatever you say. Another example is Obama, who honestly has a gift for writing in the conventional sense.
I think it depends who you ask. If you watch most populist speeches, it’s all in the performance. How they move their hands, their bodies, they create an almost theatrical narrative by how they get loud and quiet throughout the speech.
You can also have incredibly skilled orators where it’s all in the substance, but you can really only do that if you message actually has substance to it in the first place.
This is an interesting position to take. I’ve been back and forth with my N+1 about the utility of sync vs async comms to lead, and I can never nail down a result I’m happy with. Like, sync comms is effective for ladder climbing as you say. But it has failure modes in remote-first teams of ICs across time zones that async comms don’t have. Async comms inherently scale further, too. Maybe their reach is is greater but the impact is lower? I wonder how far recorded video gets. Then you have mentoring juniors - much easier to do synchronously. What’s the appropriate mix?
