Here’s the thing. The problem isn’t senior leaders who are being thrust into distributed environments where they need to rely on their writing skills and reading comprehension ability. The problem is that even to be able to deduce intent from written communication, you need to spend months, nay years, of your life in the room with other humans. It’s how you build a mental model for how other humans work. If you haven’t built this model, if you’ve spent your career typing versus talking with humans, then the above advice won’t resonate because you’ll believe the way to interact with the humans is via short, pithy statements via the keyboard. It’s not. You stopped reading in the first paragraph. This footnote didn’t stand a chance.