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”
