key phrases to use when you talk to your boss

by Alison Green on March 17, 2026

Years ago I used to do lots of list-type posts (10 things you should know about work by the time you’re 30, 8 signs you’re a bad boss, etc). I came across this one from 2017 and thought it was worth resurrecting.

If you’re like a lot of people, you might get anxious when you have to talk to your boss – or you might leave the conversation feeling unsure of what kind of impression you made. Or maybe you’ve just noticed that your relationship with your manager could be smoother. Whatever the case, the following seven phrases will help you get what you need from your boss, communicate better, and keep yourself in good standing.

1. “We can do X or Y. I propose Y because…” The idea here is that you’re not just dumping a problem on your boss and waiting for her to come up with a solution. Instead, you’re thinking through how to solve the problem and proposing a way forward. This makes your boss’s job easier, because she has something concrete to react to – and in many cases can just say “yes, that sounds great, go do that.” It also positions you as someone who proactively solves problems, and that’s a skill that’s nearly always going to be needed if you want to take on more responsibility or get promoted.

2. “I’m of course glad to do it the way you asked, but I want to flag that one possible problem is X.” If you think that something your manager is asking you to do is a bad idea, this framing can help you raise it without looking argumentative. You’re clearly saying that you’re perfectly happy to do what your boss has asked, but you’re also offering a perspective that she might not have considered and might find helpful.

3. “I realized that I’m not entirely sure what you meant when you said X earlier.” Sometimes your manager might say something that leaves you confused or even worried, but the conversation moved on before you had a chance to ask about it. That does not mean you are sentenced to leave with your uncertainty or worry forever, just because you missed your chance in the moment! It’s perfectly okay to ask about it later. In fact, most managers would strongly prefer that you do bring it up later, so that they have a chance to clarify whatever they meant.

4. “Can we talk about how I should prioritize?” I hear from a lot of people who are frustrated about their workloads but who haven’t asked for help in prioritizing. Instead, they assume they’re just supposed to get it all done quickly, and as a result they end up stressed out or letting things fall through the cracks. It’s important to realize that your manager may not realize how large your workload has become or that you have two big projects due on the same day or that other conflicts are getting in the way. Your manager is probably busy and has lots to juggle, and is relying on you to speak up if your workload has become unmanageable. If she’s decent at her job, she’ll be glad to give input on how you should prioritize – and even on what you might be able to push back or jettison altogether.

5. “Thanks for giving me that feedback – it’s really useful to hear.” Too often, people get upset or defensive when receiving critical feedback – and while that shouldn’t make managers hesitant to give feedback in the future, the reality is that it often does. Other people don’t have much of a reaction at all, leaving their managers stumped about whether they’re really processing the conversation. But if instead you’re cheerful and openly appreciative of the guidance, you’ll likely ensure that your boss gives you a steady stream of guidance that will help you get better and better at what you do. And you’ll probably be thought of us as exceptionally mature and easy to work with.

6. “Is there a way I could make it easier for you to give input?” If you have trouble getting the input from your boss that you need in order to move projects forward, try asking this question. You might find out that you’d get faster answers if you call rather than emailing, or if you grab your boss for two minutes in the hallway after the morning staff meeting, or even that she’ll spot your emails faster if you use a particular subject line structure, or all sorts of other possibilities.

7. “Can I repeat back my understanding of this assignment to make sure I’ve got it?” This is a particularly good question to ask if you’ve noticed that your boss sometimes doesn’t mention crucial details until you’re already halfway through an assignment (or worse, finished with it), or that you two don’t always leave conversations with the same understanding of what was agreed to. Giving a quick summary of what you’re taking away from the conversation may help her realize that she needs to share additional key details with you and will help you both spot places where you might not be on the same page.

{ 47 comments }

{ 47 comments… read them below }

  1. bamcheeks*

    6. “Is there a way I could make it easier for you to give input?”

    Related to this — I don’t have too much difficulty getting feedback from my manager, but I’m currently trying to coordinate a couple of big projects which go across five people at her level (including her). Two are get back to me eventually and answer the question I’ve asked, and two are very friendly and positive, but always take the question and springboard into, “this is really hard to answer because… [can open, worms everywhere]” I appreciate all these bigger things but I have a hard external deadline, guys! I try and make the question very limited and specific and acknowledge that it is connected to a lot of other things, but they both just *really* like talking about the bigger picture and how this ties into the bigger strategy and what should happen instead of what actually happens, and I get it! But I have a deadline!

    I feel like I’m constantly going back to my manager to say, “I’ve got what I need from Freddy and Bungle, but please tell Rod and Jane that I just need an answer!” That works eventually but my manager explicitly employed me not to have to do this herself, and I think I haven’t been nearly assertive enough about it because the deadlines are now *very* close and we still have a lot of work to do to pull it all into shape. Any suggestions?

    2. Kevin Sours*

      1) Can you talk to your manager about how she wants to handle it, laying it out just like you did for us? “I feel like I need to be more assertive so that you don’t get pulled into this but I want to make sure I don’t overstep”. At some point you can’t *make* Rod and Jane answer and it’s up to your manager to deal with it or push it further up the chain.

      2) Can you give Rod and Jane an interim deadline? “I need to get these questions settled by Tuesday or our Friday deadline is as risk”. or “Work on our deliverable for Friday is being held up because we haven’t settled X and Y”. Highlighting the consequences can light a fire under people.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        I think your second suggestion is especially great. People who like to get all visionary over the big picture are definitely not thinking about the right here right now, in my experience, so a shove towards that (with bcc-ing the boss if it continues) is welcome. Just a quick “we need a decision on X by Thursday so we can complete the project at hand for the client. We do not want to be late with this” or “X needs to have an answer going left or right by 4PM or we won’t be able to get input from the vendor the client specifically requested” or something to remind them that it’s great to think big, but you have to complete small to get there.

        1. I forgot my keymash*

          “it’s great to think big, but you have to complete small to get there.”

          This is such a great way to put it!

      2. bamcheeks*

        The interim deadline was 19th December! I feel bad because now I really am at the point of “no, I need you to drop everything and DO THIS”. But I think that after we’ve got the deadline out of the way I do need a bigger picture conversation with my manager about when I should have pushed harder or gone back to her.

        1. Kevin Sours*

          You do need to discuss with your manager how to approach things but the usual escalation for missing the interim dead line is to send out an response “I still need A, B, and C as soon as possible. The deadline for X is now at risk”. Followed by “I need A, B, and C. We will most likely need to extend deadline X to complete the work once I get that.”.

          Not only do you need to set an interim deadline you need to highlight the consequences of missing it. “We aren’t going to meet the real deadline” gets attention. But it is aggressive and best to be sure your manager has your back (and if she doesn’t then it can be her problem if people don’t get you what you need).

    3. Ama*

      You should check with your manager before doing this, but in a similar situation at a former job after a few standard requests for feedback, my boss was okay with me saying “we have a hard deadline to move this forward so if I don’t hear from you by (date that was a few days before the actual deadline), we’ll assume you don’t have any changes (or” we’ll assume you approve ” whichever was most appropriate).

      With some of our slow responders this actually got a response and with the others we had documentation that we had told them they were running out of time if they got annoyed about it later.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        Truly the documentation is the key part.
        My last boss before this job was one of those “well, you didn’t send me the data for Project! I’ve been waiting” and our whole group just started forwarding him the emails where we had sent it the week before (if we said “Oh I sent that last Friday” he would insist that it was faster for us to email it to him again. Even if we were working in the lab and wouldn’t be back at our desks for an hour. Heaven forfend he do a little work and search Outlook. So we stopped telling him and just forwarded the initial email.).

      2. bamcheeks*

        That’s more or less the point I’m at now, but it’s come after 3-4 months of me asking for the information in a range of different formats. In the end, I wrote up a first draft based on 50% of the information I needed and 50% guesswork, and my manager re-wrote it to correct a lot of the guesswork. Now we’re asking for feedback and we can technically go with what we’ve got, but I’m kind of frustrated that so much of it was written by my boss, when she initially kept describing it as a piece of work I would be leading on and responsible for. I don’t know if this was inevitable because it was never going to be possible to pin them down, or whether I’ve let her down by not pushing harder for the right and complete information at an earlier stage.

        1. Ama*

          While I was working at the job I described above, I once had a project with an initial timeline of three months take two *years* because it took that long to get the relevant parties to respond to documents I sent. In that case there wasn’t really a hard deadline and there weren’t really any consequences to the delay, so there was no need to move forward without their feedback, but it was frustrating.

          I’d be willing to bet your boss knows what those colleagues are like and was prepared for this possibility, but you can certainly do a debrief with her and see if there’s anything else she thinks you could have done.

        2. Silver Robin*

          Have you asked your boss if she is okay with how things went? Because you keep mentioning guesses and assumptions about how she feels. You feel bad because she hired you to not have to do the chasing, to not have to write as much of the report, etc. But maybe she is happy with having to only do 50% this time instead of 100%! Sure, you can and should ask about strategies to deal with the visionaries moving forward, but you might not have actually let your boss down.

    4. Great Frogs of Literature*

      I have some exhaustively-hash-out-the-big-picture people who I deal with periodically, and the way I handle mine is to let them talk, and then once they’ve run down, go back to the question I need answered: “So that’s good background info, but for the order I need to make tomorrow, should I get the large or the small size?”

      It sounds like you’re empowered to push these folks for answers — your boss wants you to do this — what happens if you just keep pushing for what you actually need?

      (There are variations on this that shortcut the half-hour monologue on sizing policies or whatever, but for people senior to you it’s probably easier to start by reiterating the question VERY CLEARLY after they’ve had their initial say.)

      1. Kevin Sours*

        Some phrases I’ve used to keep focus
        “What problem are we trying to solve here?”
        or the more pointed:
        “The problem where are trying to solve here is X”.
        and
        “I don’t disagree but we need to solve this by DATE”

    5. KitKat*

      I’d try something like “I totally get it, there’s a ton of complexity! Since External Issue X isn’t going to change on the timeline for this project, can we try Interim Decision Y, and revisit if circumstances change in the future?” Try to acknowledge what they’re saying is important but that ALSO this project has to move forward.

      I also like the other suggestion to get your boss’s perspective on managing this input. Sometimes a more senior person is just better positioned to run interference and focus other senior people.

    6. SansaStark*

      I worked with someone like this and it’s like pulling teeth. I had to get really comfortable with pushing people way up the food chain to give me a definite answer, which included increasingly firm reminders about what answers I needed and the deadline. Also I always gave them a fake deadline. If I needed to email Debbie by Thursday, I asked them for their answers by COB Tuesday (or even Monday).

    7. Cats make the worst bosses*

      I’ve generally had success with “I understand that you think XYZ should change, and I agree with you (if I do). Unfortunately, my scope for this project is X, and I have a deadline of date. Would you prefer me to do thing 1 or thing 2?”
      If you’re doing it via email, it might be worth trying to catch them in person or on the phone, preferably about 10 minutes before they have another meeting so there’s a pre-defined time limit.

  2. Emma*

    Would you be in a position to put the same kind of question to Rod and Jane, ideally sometime when there isn’t a deadline? E.g., “It sometimes seems to be the case that feedback gets stuck on questions about bigger-picture issues, is there a way I could make it easier for you to give input?”

  3. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

    If you are fortunate enough to be blessed with a good boss, you can communicate that to them without being a suckup. Catch them doing something right, the way you would hope they would catch you, and let them know you see it.

    1. Richard Hershberger*

      I am fortunate to have a manager whose ego doesn’t need to be managed. The other kind is exhausting, and requires much wasted time.

  5. spiffi*

    #4 is huge! This is what management’s JOB is – to make the hard decisions about which task is going to get pushed out, when not *everything* is possible to get done – or to figure out how to get more resources allocated if nothing can be pushed out.

    And from their perspective – better to find out ahead of time that there is a problem meeting a deadline, when there is time to adjust – than for them to be caught out at the last minute when the deadline hits and the work isn’t done?

    1. Monkeying Around for Money*

      Standard answer to #4 in my workplace is “everything is important.” Unironically. I’ve laughed as if they were making a funny joke, not realizing that they were actually serious!

      I will sometimes talk through the list with them in the order I think makes the most sense, and sometimes this prompts them to make a decision.

      1. AngryOctopus*

        I mean, I used to work at a biotech startup and my boss would joke that everything was a priority. But then she’d either help me prioritize right there, or she’d check with stakeholders and let me know by end of day. And if anything changed (like a meeting that needed data got moved) she’d let me know AND if we had proceeded for a Wed meeting but they moved it to Monday, she’d just say “sorry, we planned for Wed, so that data isn’t ready yet”.

        1. spiffi*

          Yes, I mean, there is always that initial somewhat serious/somewhat joking response of “everything is a priority” – but then we get down to actually seriously going through the list and figuring out what to focus on TODAY – sometimes the priority will change tomorrow – but that is fine too :D

      2. Cats make the worst bosses*

        Ugh, I worked for that guy. I was young, or I’d have left earlier. It wasn’t his only bad-boss quality, either. Great coworker, though. I hear he’s back to “individual contributor” and everyone is much happier.

    2. Poppy*

      Yes, I once asked the manager who kept piling stuff on to me, “What is the priority?” She immediately replied, “Everything is a priority.” I was bereft of words. I was out of that offive in a couple of months, to work with reasonable people.

      I’ve thought since that a better way of phrasing it would be, “Which should I do first?” to circumvent a stupid answer. But that’s staircase wit.

  6. Philly*

    Would love a reverse of this too, key phrases for direct reports. Trying to be a good manager and struggling, I fear.

    2. Hlao-roo*

      There’s a great round-up of advice for managers here:

      “advice for new managers” from January 17, 2023

      I also think these posts could be helpful (the first one is also linked in the round-up):

      “how to make 1-on-1 check-in meetings more useful” from June 12, 2014

      “how can I stop softening the message in tough conversations with my staff?” from March 4, 2015

      “my employee refuses to do her job and leads me in circles about why she won’t” from Novemeber 2, 2022

  7. Crystal*

    How about a way to ask a manager to clarify what they mean (after they’ve contradicted themselves several times while explaining something to you) without triggering an aggressive/defensive response? This is my bugbear.

    1. Troubadour*

      Would it work to say “Just to check I’ve understood correctly: if the furgle is turning clockwise it’ll glarf the chandnoggle, but if it’s turning anti-clockwise it’ll brimp the relopsis, and then we need to run that through the paisler as well.”

      1. Crystal*

        I could say something like that but there would be a very decent chance he would just agree with whatever I had just proposed even it if it was incorrect. He seems to experience extreme discomfort whenever he is questioned in any way and will just blurt out whatever stops the person questioning him the quickest.
        Then later down the line when the process obviously is not working/there have been complaints to higher ups he will swear up and down he had never said that and throw that person under the bus.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          It sounds like it’s time to put it in writing, rather than relying on verbal instructions. I can’t tell if your boss has particular issues with verbal instructions or if he has the same issues with written ones, but at least an email will be a permanent record that you tried to clarify:

          “Following up from our meeting today, my understanding is that you want me to switch the direction the furgle turns from clockwise to anti-clockwise. I’ll proceed with that unless you tell me otherwise.” (Or “I’ll proceed with that when you confirm”, if you prefer.)

          1. Crystal*

            He rarely if ever replies in email format. He tends to reply to emails with impromptu calls on teams where he continues to contradict himself. But you’re right. Having a written record is all I can do. He tends to get very bitter if I ever refer to that written record though and calls me “petty” for bringing it up when what he has instructed us to do is inevitably incorrect but I’m at a loss for any other way to handle him.

        2. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I had a boss like that, this is why I confirmed things by email. Her memory suddenly got a lot better when that happened.

      2. Baroness Schraeder*

        Oh goodness, you don’t want to glarf the chandnoggle, there’s no recovering from that!

  8. Mockingjay*

    I’ve been using variations of #1 and #4 for years now. These have greatly simplified my work life. I rephrase #4 as a proposed statement instead of a question, so Manager only has to agree to one of the proffered scenarios.

    I don’t have to invoke #7 on my current project, but in the past, I always sent it as an email: “Recapping our discussion today, the teapot spout design will be changed to a 4-inch length, not 3 inches.” If boss changed their mind, I simply sent another email. Those emails saved my backside at ExToxicJob.

  9. FemiFrankie*

    Absolutely love the use of the “she” pronoun! It struck me as odd upon first glance before I realized how many posts refer to a hypothetical boss or authority figure as “he” and I don’t even register it.

    1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

      The more time I spend here, the more natural it feels and the more I find myself defaulting to it. Surely I’m not the only person who’s done this. Alison is changing the world.

  10. Seraphina*

    I use all of these! Great suggestions. I am luckily that my current manager is easy to talk to. I especially use the “help me prioritize, please” when I get handed a bunch of things at once.

  11. Dasein9 (he/him)*

    I had an experience where management was tapping me for a project I was not qualified for. It involved skills that I have no experience in. When I told them outright that I don’t have the requisite skills, they seemed to think I was being a diva and trying to pick and choose my projects.

    When a similar thing happened again, I changed tacks and gave a list of things I would need to make it happen. That got a much more positive reaction. And I didn’t get stuck with a project I couldn’t do.

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