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Leadership and upward communication

Published on July 30, 2026   21 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
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.
0:47
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.

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Leadership and upward communication

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