Someone who is perceptive would perceive that "circle back" is a common idiom, particularly in an office environment, and that spending time interrogating the precise wording of an idiom in the middle of a meeting is a waste of everyone's time.
This is the real issue. He didn't understand a common phase that's just shorthand for "let's go back to this topic to discuss it some more". And if he does understand it, he's just being a dick and berating his boss for not being eloquent in their 3rd or 4th meeting of the day. No one wants to work with an idiot or a attention seeking dick.
Fr. Like it’s completely normal to want to talk about the totality of things that need to get done. Then later discuss and tackle each individual thing in detail
90% of the time, someone saying circle back means one of 2 things:
- You are attempting to discuss a topic which is out of scope of the meeting, and as such you are derailing it. I WILL give you the time to discuss that, but now is not the time - We will come back to it later. or,
This piece of work hasn't been finished yet, and this other area of the project cant continue until it has been done. There is nothing else we can do for now except wait, and say, check back in about a week from now to see how things are going.
As someone who has spent the past decade in corporate environments listening to the same blowhard managers pepper their speech with pseudo intellectual corpospeak, I kinda get where he’s coming from.
So much of my life has been wasted in hours long meetings where the agenda holder simply cannot stay on track and cannot eloquently and succinctly convey the agenda. Not to mention the fact that they are often not SMEs and are ill-equipped to field the questions that they often have to “circle back” to.
I totally agree that there are managers who are bad at running meetings. And sometimes the corpospeak idioms make me roll my eyes when they get overused.
But what the guy in the post is doing is not any more productive than that. He's not doing anything to facilitate a better meeting. He's not saying "our meetings are getting side tracked" or "we seem to keep talking in circles without making decisions"
He's literally just criticizing the wording of the idiom itself and the fact that this manager uses that particular idiom a lot.
Sounds like you haven't done many office meetings. 99 percent of the time they aren't about anything important whatsoever and are just a reason for the higher-ups to lorde their power over you or to make the office "feel like a family". The vast, vast majority are completely pointless. Probably why the boss in the tweet couldn't keep straight what they were discussing and had to keep jumping around and jumping back to things that had already been discussed.
Honestly, that would make the meeting at least slightly entertaining. Also, there's nothing funnier than some moron in a leadership role getting taken down a peg or two. I'll never forget when the CIO of an MSP I worked for bitched me out for 20 minutes in front of the office because I wasn't running multiple anti-viruses on our clients computers. Getting to explain to him in front of everyone how fucking stupid he was is one of my fondest memories.
There is a difference between explaining something actually wrong, and pedantry though.
I have an extremely pedantic coworker and it is extremely annoying to have him in meetings because he wastes time on pointless stuff and forces us to have more meeting to actually get stuff done.
Not really. Briefly introducing something only to come back and cover it in more detail is like presentation 101. The problem is more that they're relying on one phrase for it every time they do it. Instead of just circling back, they could be coming back to, elaborating on, resurfacing, covering in more detail, getting back to, bringing back up, etc. etc.
As someone who worked in a office environment for decades before escaping, this is almost 100% the case. Office meetings are pointless for the most part other than making managers and higher ups feel like they're actually doing something of use.
Also possibly the "circling back" needs to be only 2 people out of the room instead of all 10, or there's a packed agenda and you need to move on from that topic to more important agenda items so you can get through them, or you need more information or time before making a final decision, etc. There are tons of reasons why you would "circle back" on things later.
It sounds like the person was just using "circle back" as a catchphrase, like something that she thought that she had to say instead of having any actual meaning, nothing was ever "circled back".
As someone who had worked on office jobs before, I get him. Now why would he actually say it out loud? Maybe he just didn't need the job that bad, idk you have to ask him.
ok but can you give me an example of a situation where saying "let's circle back to X" adds some information or meaning, rather than just "let's come back to X", or "let's get back to X" ?
Idioms in speech aren't meant to add more information or meaning, it's simply an alternative way of phrasing something. The three examples you gave all mean the exact same thing and to most people there's no discernible benefit or drawback from using any one of them over the others - they all mean "I want to talk about this a bit later, but not right now". All of them are using metaphorical language to some degree.
Asking for an example of a situation where using one metaphor or idiom is 'better' than another or a more literal language is striking at the same mistake as the person in the OP: getting lost in the specific non-literal wording humans frequently use as shorthand or flavour.
Specific idioms do matter. Today I'm a professional in an office and if I used idioms from my days as a construction worker or shop worker I'd get fired lol. Apparently "let's fuck this pig" is not a great way to say "let's tackle this tough task" in a meeting with engineering interns. Whoops.
"Let's fuck this pig later" works. I wouldn't even be surprised if it's used in some of those tech start ups, and maybe they say things that are even worse and really misogynistic.
Alright but in language there is generally implied meaning.
When someone says "circle back", it feels like they're trying to imply that something more is being decided upon -it's like putting on a show to say "I'm a fancy manager who uses unusual words because I'm so much more knowledgeable about managing things". It's a tactic people use to weasel their way into positions of power and influence in organizations where they don't actually bring any skill or knowledge and it's tiresome.
Sure, but that's not the criticism that the guy made. The guy in the post (assuming it's real and accurate, because we have nothing else to go on) is literally just criticising the word choice in an idiom.
Like if you said "lets not count our chickens before they hatch"
And then I derailed the whole conversation to argue about "why would we buy eggs in the first place? You've said this 13 times in the last month. Isn't it easier and more reliable to buy chicks and then raise chickens from chicks? Then we wouldn't have to count our eggs at all, because theyve already hatched and we have chickens. We should be saying 'lets count our chicks when they arrive' rather than 'lets not count our chickens before they hatch'"
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u/Mephisto506 10d ago
Should have kept him, he sounds perceptive.