{"id":1515373,"date":"2026-09-22T11:08:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T09:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/?post_type=articles&p=1515373"},"modified":"2026-09-22T11:08:25","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T09:08:25","slug":"what-the-odyssey-reveals-about-leadership-and-communication","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/articles\/what-the-odyssey-reveals-about-leadership-and-communication\/","title":{"rendered":"What The Odyssey Reveals About Leadership and Communication"},"featured_media":1515376,"template":"","meta":{"_has_post_settings":{"highlight_sharing":"default","image_sharing":"default","headline_sharing":"default"}},"schools":[],"areas":[481],"subjects":[420],"class_list":["post-1515373","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","areas-leadership","subjects-managing-people"],"custom-fields":{"wpcf-article-leadin":["The Odyssey<\/em> reveals how leadership depends on dissent, truth, and resisting the illusions created by authority, writes Filiberto Avila."],"wpcf-article-body":["Nearly three thousand years later, The Odyssey <\/em>continues to find new audiences. Christopher Nolan's recent adaptation has reignited public interest in Homer's epic, prompting renewed conversations about its mythology, characters, and cultural influence. While much of that discussion has focused on the film's visual scale and departures from the ancient text, this interest also provides an opportunity to return to the epic itself and consider what The Odyssey <\/em>can tell us about communication and leadership.\r\n\r\nThe epic is traditionally read as a story of adventure, heroism, perseverance, and homecoming. Communication rarely appears among its central themes. Yet, every decisive moment in Odysseus' journey turns not simply on physical action, but on the creation, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning. Read through this lens, The Odyssey <\/em>becomes a meditation on the communicative conditions that make leadership possible \u2013 and the illusions that threaten it.\r\n\r\nLeadership is not simply the exercise of authority. It is shaped by how reality is interpreted, decisions are justified, relationships are negotiated, and trust is maintained. Its effectiveness therefore depends less on whether leaders possess authority than on their ability to remain connected to reality, and to the people willing to challenge their version of it.\r\n\r\nThe major episodes of The Odyssey <\/em>present Odysseus with different communicative challenges: the Trojan Horse transforms trust into deception; Circe dismantles carefully constructed identities; and the Sirens persuade through narrative rather than force. Even his return to Ithaca is not simply about conquest, but recognition \u2013 the restoration of relationships capable of distinguishing appearance from reality.\r\n\r\nTaken together, these episodes suggest the greatest danger facing leaders is not uncertainty, opposition, or even failure. It is illusion. As leaders gain authority, they can gradually lose access to truth. Odysseus' encounter with Circe demonstrates this clearly. When Odysseus\u2019 men arrive at Circe\u2019s palace, they find a host who appears welcoming. She invites them inside and offers them food and drink\u2026 only to drug them and transform them into pigs. However, there is a crucial distinction: although their bodies have changed, \u201ctheir minds remained the same.\u201d (All quotations from Emily Wilson translation.)<\/em>\r\n\r\nThis episode turns on a problem that extends beyond Circe\u2019s magic: the difficulty of distinguishing appearance from reality. The men look like beasts without becoming beasts in mind. That tensions runs throughout The Odyssey<\/em>. Odysseus himself survives by understanding that identity can be performed and perception manipulated. He withholds his name, invents stories, adopts disguises, and repeatedly navigates between how things appear and what they are.\r\n\r\nChristopher Nolan\u2019s modern-day adaptation leans into this distinction. When Odysseus accuses Circe of transforming his men into beasts, she rejects the accusation: \u201cI didn\u2019t turn your men into anything. Look at them. This is what they are. Look at them. Beasts.\u201d As Odysseus prepares to leave, she offers one final remark: \u201cBack to your disguises.\u201d Where Homer\u2019s Circe transforms the men\u2019s outward appearance while leaving their minds intact, Nolan\u2019s Circe presents the transformation as revelation. The adaptation reverses the logic of Homer\u2019s original episode: the beast is no longer a disguise imposed upon the men, but something their human appearance had concealed. Nolan\u2019s Circe does not create monsters. She dismantles narratives.\r\n\r\nThe distinction between the two versions matters. Homer separates outward appearance from inner identity; Nolan deliberately collapses them. Yet both raise the same communicative problem: how do we distinguish what someone appears to be from what they are?\r\n\r\nFor leaders, this question carries particular significance. Authority itself creates appearances. As Erving Goffman's seminal work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life<\/em><\/a>, argues, social interaction can be understood through the metaphor of theatrical performance, as individuals present themselves to others and manage the impressions others form of them. Leaders are expected to project confidence amid uncertainty, resolve amid ambiguity, and composure amid crisis. Such performances are often necessary. The danger arises when performance becomes indistinguishable from reality \u2013 not only to those watching, but to the leader performing it. The longer leaders inhabit a carefully constructed public identity, the easier it becomes for them to mistake their own performance for reality. Their subsequent successes reinforce the narrative. Their authority shields it from scrutiny. Eventually, the distinction between who a leader is and who a leader appears to be begins to disappear.\r\n\r\nCirce exposes the danger of illusion. Odysseus' crew reveals how dissent can keep it in check.\r\n\r\nThroughout The Odyssey<\/em>, Odysseus' crew is hardly portrayed as flawless. Despite explicit warnings, they slaughter Helios\u2019 sacred cattle. They complain, question his decisions, and refuse to follow him silently. Their failings make it easy to dismiss the role they play. Their failures can make it easy to dismiss the role they play. Yet doing so overlooks something essential: they remain among the few people willing to speak honestly to their leader.\r\n
We tend to equate loyalty with agreement and criticism with resistance.<\/blockquote>\r\nOne of the clearest examples comes after the crew has spent a year on Circe\u2019s island. Surrounded by comfort, Odysseus has allowed the journey home to stall. It is his own men who finally pull him aside and remind him of what he has lost sight of: Ithaca.\u00a0 \u201cRemember your own home.\" Their intervention works: Odysseus acknowledges that their words restore his resolve, and he approaches Circe to ask that they be allowed to continue their journey.\r\n\r\nThe moment captures something essential about leadership: sometimes those being led must remind the leader where they are supposed to be going. (And the leader must be willing to listen.) Odysseys does not recover his purpose alone; his crew helps restore it.\r\n\r\nAmy Edmondson of Harvard Business School's work on psychological safety<\/a> has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of why that matters. Her research demonstrates that effective organizations are not distinguished by the absence of conflict, but by environments where individuals can raise concerns, admit uncertainty, and challenge assumptions without fear of punishment. This type of environment is often associated with innovation and organizational learning, but its implications for leadership are equally important: a leader\u2019s access to truth depends in part on whether an organization creates opportunities that allow uncomfortable truths to reach them.\r\n\r\nModern organizations can often interpret disagreement as dysfunction. We tend to equate loyalty with agreement and criticism with resistance. Yet communication research increasingly suggests precisely the opposite. Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison of NYU Stern describes voice as the communication of ideas, concerns, problems, or suggestions intended to bring about improvement or change<\/a>. When employees remain silent, organizations lose access to information that could identify problems or challenges in prevailing assumptions. Healthy organizations therefore preserve opportunities for workers to speak up, to dissent, because it can function as corrective feedback, interrupting overconfidence before it becomes costly. For leaders, the danger is that silence can easily be mistaken for agreement or trust when it may instead reflect resignation, fear, disengagement, or the quiet recognition that speaking honestly is no longer worth the personal risk.\r\n\r\nKarl Weick, one of the foundational scholars in organizational behavior, argued that organizations survive by continuously making sense of uncertain environments<\/a>. Sensemaking is not an individual achievement; it is a collective communicative process through which people interpret ambiguous events together. Leaders do not make sense of the world alone. They depend upon others who notice what they overlook, question what they assume, and reinterpret what appears obvious.\r\n\r\nFor leaders, then, access to information is not the same as access to truth. Information can be filtered, softened, dismissed, or withheld as it moves through an organization. The more difficult it becomes to challenge authority, the easier it becomes for leaders to mistake the information that reaches them for the whole picture. The relationship between Odysseus and his crew therefore deserves renewed attention. They are imperfect. Sometimes disastrously so. Yet they remain his final mirror. Every leader needs people willing to interrupt certainty before certainty hardens into illusion. Every institution needs information to travel upward rather than merely downward. The moment no one remains willing to challenge the leader, leadership loses its final mirror. It is isolation. And isolation is one of power's greatest illusions.\r\n\r\nLeadership is never simply about directing others. It is also about resisting the illusions that power can create. That requires people willing to challenge comfortable narratives before those narratives become convictions.\r\n\r\nThe Odyssey<\/em> may come from a world far from the modern workplace, but the dynamics of leadership it depicts are familiar. As authority grows, disagreement and uncomfortable information can more easily be silenced or filtered before reaching those in charge.\r\n\r\nOf course, this does not mean that leaders necessarily welcome dissent. It is not an easy medicine to take, and Odysseus makes that clear when Eurylochus challenges his judgement. Eurylochus warns the crew against following Odysseus back to Circe\u2019s house and openly blames his \u201cbad choices\u201d for the deaths of their companions. Odysseus\u2019s response is striking: \u201cAt that, I thought of drawing my long sword \/ from by my sturdy thigh, to cut his head off.\u201d Although Eurylochus does not have all the information Odysseus possesses at this moment, that is precisely what makes the exchange revealing. What matters less is whether Eurylochus is right than what his disagreement provokes: Odysseus responds to being challenged as though the challenge itself were a threat. But however uncomfortable dissent may be to hear, it remains necessary to good leadership.\r\n\r\nLeaders need people on their team who are willing to question assumptions and organizations need channels that allow uncomfortable information to travel upward. Both are necessary to prevent authority from becoming a barrier to understanding what is actually happening.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\u00a9 IE Insights."],"wpcf-audio-article":["https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Avila-Audio.mp3"],"wpcf-article-extract":["The Odyssey reveals how leadership depends on dissent, truth, and resisting the illusions created by authority, writes Filiberto Avila."],"wpcf-article-extract-enable":["1"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/1515373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/articles"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1515376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1515373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"schools","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/schools?post=1515373"},{"taxonomy":"areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/areas?post=1515373"},{"taxonomy":"subjects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subjects?post=1515373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}