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My name is Dennis Tourish.
I am an emeritus professor
of leadership and
organisation studies at
the University of Sussex.
I have authored and co-authored
quite a large number of books
on leadership communication,
management and how organisations
thrive or perish in
our modern world.
Our topic today is leadership
and upward communication,
which I think is very
important because
we tend to imagine communication
involving leaders as downward,
how leaders communicate their
message to other people.
I think that it's equally
important to consider
how people communicate
with leaders,
how they feed into the system,
what they think
needs to be done,
the ideas that they
can contribute,
and the corrective feedback
that they can offer
to leaders as well.
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In this talk, we'll be looking
at the nature of employee voice.
We will look at what
gets in the way of
open communication
between leaders and those
that they manage because
I think that the evidence
shows us that a lot of that
communication is closed,
limited or defective
in various other ways.
We will try and conclude
by looking at the
steps that leaders and
organisations can
take to promote
what I describe as more
critical upward communication.
A lot of the upward
communication
that normally takes
place lacks criticality.
It tends to consist of
those without power
emphasizing how much they agree
with those who have power.
My focus here on
this topic today is
how do we get people to say
what they really think?
That is, be critical of what
the organisation is doing,
and perhaps more importantly,
what it needs to do
in order to thrive.
