Meeting 101 Buzzwords

I’ve had the pleasure of working with strong communicators early in my Microsoft career. Here are some of their go-to phrases under different scenarios:

Starting a meeting

• “Hey everyone can you hear us? This is __, we have x y x in the conference room. We will start with __ first. I’m sharing my screen, can you see it?”
• “Ok, why don’t we go ahead and get started? I wanted to start with __. I also have a whole bunch of topics I want to discuss”
• “I apologize if my connection is not as good as I am working from home. Please let me know if you need me to repeat anything”
• “Give me a second while we get started/let’s give it a few minutes then we’ll go ahead and get started”
• “I wanted to call this meeting real quick to discuss how we want to approach ___. Right now, __. Just for a little bit of context for everybody, __ please jump in to correct me if I’m wrong”
• “Just to give everyone an update”

When you don’t know something

• “Sorry I may have missed something here”
• “I’m just wondering”
• “I’m not sure I understand what is the issue”
• “Ok, what action items should we track here besides __”
• “Do you have any commentary on that?”
• “That’s a good question, I haven’t thought about it in a while”
• “I don’t have the history on this”
• “I don’t have any detail on that. He said __. That’s all I know at the moment. Does that help?”
• “Sorry I don’t have details on __. I’ll have his stuff included for next week after I meet with __ to check”
• “__, I’ll let you speak to that”
• “There’s a lot of movement on this one, I’ll have to come back with this one. We are seeing a lot of complexity on the __”
• “How do I think about __?”

When you want to clarify something

• “Ok, let me summarize/to summarize”
• “So the gist of it is __”
• “Let me read that back to you”
• “What I hear you saying is”
• “If I got you right”
• “How can I help?”
• “What are you looking for?”
• “What do you need that I am not giving you?”
• “Remind me real quick”
• “I just wanted to test what I heard”
• “Can you let me know if our numbers match?”
• “I want to make sure I’m capturing this right”
• “___, am I hearing this right?”
• “Can you repeat Tom? Not quite sure what you are trying to ask”

Video conferencing issues

• “did we lose __?”
• “sorry, one more time?”
• “sorry Dan you got really quiet there”
• “I’m on the call, what’s up?”
• “Oh, sorry I missed that”

How to interrupt

• “can I jump in here really quickly?”
• “a quick question on __”
• “sorry, just to loop back on __”
• “I have to hop on a call with __, if you need me please ping me”

Defusing a situation

• “I get your point. This is why we need to have this discussion”
• “We get your feedback”
• “So you’re saying __ doesn’t work for you?”
• “I want to be careful _”
• “Why don’t you let us come back with __. We’ll see if we can __ and let you know”
• “We will double check and come back with an answer on when we can get it”
• “We will provide you with timing as soon as we can”
• “Let me take a look at your feedback over the next couple of days and I’ll see what I can do”
• “I know this is not the answer you are looking for but this is the info we have to the best of our knowledge”