The Things We Don’t Say Enough
I've spent most of my career thinking about how people learn and develop — and a significant part of that time watching managers say the wrong thing at the wrong moment, often without knowing it. Or, alternately, watching managers say nothing at all where a specific, well-chosen phrase would have changed everything.
This isn't about scripts or communication formulas. It's about a small set of phrases that do something conventional managerial language doesn't — that create the conditions for a different kind of conversation, a different quality of relationship, and in some cases a different outcome entirely. I've collected these over the years through observation, through reading, and — more often than I'd like to admit — through the experience of not having said them when I should have.
"Help me understand."
The instinct when something goes wrong, or when an employee's behavior or performance raises a question, is to ask why. Why did you do it that way? Why didn't you flag this earlier? Why isn't this done?
The problem with "why" is structural. It positions the manager as interrogator and the employee as defendant. However neutrally it's delivered, it implies that the manager already has a theory about what happened and is testing it. The employee hears the question and prepares a defense rather than an explanation — which produces a very different conversation.
"Help me understand" does something different. It suspends the manager's hypothesis, at least visibly, and invites the employee into a collaborative reconstruction of events. It signals genuine curiosity rather than pending judgment. And it sidesteps the word "why" entirely, which some people find triggering in ways that are disproportionate to the manager's intent — particularly in moments of stress or perceived criticism.
The result is usually a more honest conversation. The employee has been given permission to explain rather than defend, which means the manager is more likely to hear something true and useful — including things they hadn't anticipated.
"I trust you."
This one took me an embarrassingly long time to learn, and I learned it the hard way.
I had a team member — highly capable, conscientious, and, as I came to understand, someone for whom uncertainty registered with unusual intensity. She came to me frequently for guidance on decisions that were, in my view, well within her authority and capability to make independently. My response, more often than not, was some version of: "It's your call. You decide."
I meant it as an expression of confidence. She received it as indifference.
The gap between those two readings is smaller than it looks and larger than it sounds. "You decide" is technically an expression of trust, but it leaves the trust implicit — and for someone who is wired to interpret ambiguity as a threat signal, implicit trust is functionally indistinguishable from not caring. The absence of explicit reassurance gets filled by anxiety, not confidence.
What I should have said — and eventually learned to say — was: "I trust you to handle this." Not "I don't care, you decide." Not "figure it out." The words "I trust you" do something that "you decide" doesn't: they name the relationship rather than just delegating the task. They make the confidence explicit rather than leaving it to be inferred.
This is, at its core, a Choose Your Words problem. The meaning I intended was present in both versions. The meaning that landed was entirely different. And the difference came down to three words I didn't say.
"Can we agree on what good looks like?"
Of all the phrases on this list, this is the one I'd most want to put in the hands of every manager who has ever delivered feedback and been challenged on it.
Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone, in their work on feedback, identify three triggers that inhibit our ability to receive it: the truth trigger (I don't think this feedback is accurate), the relationship trigger (I don't trust the person giving it), and the identity trigger (this feedback threatens my sense of who I am). When a feedback conversation goes sideways, it's almost always because one or more of these triggers has been tripped.
The phrase "Can we agree on what good looks like?" addresses two of the three. It addresses the truth trigger because it doesn't assert the manager's assessment as fact. Instead of "your presentations aren't well-prepared," it opens a prior question: what does well-prepared actually mean, for this role, in this context? If the manager and employee can agree on the standard, the feedback becomes an evaluation against a shared criterion rather than one person's opinion. That's a much harder conversation to dismiss.
It addresses the identity trigger because it shifts the frame from "who you are" to "what we're trying to achieve." The employee isn't being told they're inadequate. They're being invited into a conversation about what excellence looks like — which is an inherently forward-looking and collaborative frame.
The relationship trigger is the one this phrase doesn't directly address. But in my experience, managers who are willing to have this conversation — who demonstrate enough humility to make the standard explicit rather than assumed — tend to earn the relational credibility that makes the third trigger less likely to fire in the first place.
The others, briefly:
"What's going on?" opens space without implying blame — it's the gentler cousin of "Help me understand," useful when you sense something is wrong but don't yet have enough information to ask a more specific question. As such, it’s often the best starting point for a conversation about a new or emergent pattern of underperformance.
"I'm proud of you" is personal rather than evaluative. "Good work" assesses the output. "I'm proud of you" acknowledges the person. The distinction matters more than most managers realize, particularly for employees who are growing into something difficult.
"Thank you" — genuinely meant and specifically directed — names the value of a contribution in a way that generic positive feedback doesn't. "Thanks for staying late to finish that" lands differently than "great job this week." Specificity is what makes gratitude feel real rather than managerial.
"I wonder if" introduces an alternative or a challenge without closing down the conversation. It's the manager's version of "Help me understand" — it signals curiosity and tentativeness rather than correction, which makes the employee more likely to engage with the idea than defend against it.
None of these phrases are magic. Said without genuine intent behind them, they're just slightly better scripts. What makes them work is that each one creates a specific condition — for honesty, for safety, for shared understanding — that the conventional alternative doesn't. And creating those conditions is, in the end, most of what good management communication is actually for.
The phrases we reach for in difficult moments are rarely the ones we chose deliberately. They're the ones we rehearsed — consciously or not — until they became instinct. The goal is to make these the instincts worth having.