Downward and Upward Communication: Workplace Communication Skills

most organizations are designed in ways that communication flows down the chain of command top down in very few instances are there systems in place to make sure that bottom up communication happens effectively and there's a huge advantage to doing this properly so let's unpack it hello again friends I'm Alex line if we haven't met yet this channel communication coach is here to help Rising leaders increase your impact so you can lead your teams to higher levels of Excellence I'm talking about Frontline leaders like team leaders supervisors and managers this channel is for you and today's

topic is communication that balance between top down versus bottom up communication I write about this in my new book in a couple of the chapters it's really a critical notion to get our heads around so the first thing I want to say is that most organizations are designed through and through so that communication goes from top to bottom we call this a hierarchy or a chain of command it's modeled after a military design and that's the way it is built so in almost every case unless you work really hard to do something different that's the

way information is going to flow now it's true that as Leaders you're probably going to hear a lot of people griping and complaining but that's usually not high quality information that you can do anything about that's just human nature what we don't often have is information going up the chain of command in a really reliable way so there are some obstacles to explain why this doesn't happen in a normal chain of command situation the first one is the psychological contract that Bissell meeser Smith and Kelly talk about in their research when we come to work

supervisors expect to issue the orders and employees expect this too so there's a relationship that we assume about the workplace When we arrive and for that reason alone a lot of times we don't feel as employees that it's our job to pass up information so we often don't we keep our mouths shut the second major obstacle is fear you might sour your relationship with the boss you might have that fear so if you tell the boss something maybe he or she feels connected to that project so they feel personally criticized if you share that it's

one of the reasons why employees don't want to tell the boss some negative information another one is fear that you might be labeled as a troublemaker someone that's going to rock the oh that's that person complaining again and then the third fear of course is retaliation one of the whole reasons we have an expression like don't shoot the messenger is because often times when people share information people criticize and discredit you and we do shoot the messenger so those are some of the reasons why we don't pass information naturally up the chain of command and

the third thing I want to talk about is the result the result of this is that the decision makers in the organization often are out of touch with the day-to-day operations of the Frontline employees supervisors and managers they don't have good information from that level of the organization that's a level of organization that's that's doing almost all of the work with clients and customers so they have incredibly valuable Intel and insight and feedback but there's really often no channel to pass it upward and then the leaders make these decisions and everybody seems mystified like why

in the world would we want to do that that's a horrible idea so the benefit of upward communication is better decisionmaking Intel and I really believe that leaders of the future need to take upward communication seriously in my book I recommend developing what I call dedicated channels for Upward communication and I'm not going to go into all of the details maybe we'll do that in a different video but you want to do regular employee surveys and then when you get the results you have to take action based upon those results you can't just put it

in a drawer and say oh well we'll do it again in six month six months and see if it's changed you can also do focus groups around particular issues to really dig into it there are a lot of ways to do this well to develop upper communication and so I think the main bottom line here is that left on its own the hierarchy will let information flow down but you have to develop dedicated channels to pass good information up the chain of command to get this equation in a little bit more of a balance to

develop a healthier more effective workplace so question of the day have you ever had experiences where you've tried to pass information up and it didn't go all that well I would love to hear your comments in that section below so thanks God bless and I'll see you in the next video