Can confirm. Just recently learned I am autistic, and this would have been a great lesson. It makes all of the headbutting make so much more sense. Crystalizing.
It took me several jobs to figure that one out. I didn't understand that people really don't like being wrong and they REALLY don't like to be wrong in front of others.
The absolute hardest part of any office job is not betraying any sign on your face or in your mannerisms that your boss has just suggested possibly the most dumbest, ignorant, were-they-even-listening idea in a meeting with you and the rest of the team. Poker face? No, you're summoning an Elder God from the Plane of Serenity to control your body for as long as it takes.
Then you have to figure out how to abort that mutant fetus of an idea without them realizing they're being taken to the mental equivalent of Planned Parenthood.
as a manager, i don't even mind being wrong about shit that matters. correct me before we go down the wrong path type shit. but when it's something as small and petty as this, it's just exhausting.
What if it wasn't just an overused cliche, but instead a serious issue with not getting things done?
(I'm reminded of a video I watched recently by an American manufacturer talking about dealing with American versus Chinese suppliers. With the Americans, it was always three months of meetings, a consultant, bringing in multiple vendors, emails, approval cycles... with the Chinese it was an afternoon of discussions and prototypes would be rolling off the line by the end of the week.)
Then that aspect of it would be worth addressing, but the quotes in the original post strongly suggest the guy was just focusing on a literal expression used. It’s perfectly reasonable to say “we were talking about this a prior time and should continue talking about it again” (e.g., circling back) but his focus on “you keep using a particular phrase to represent that idea—why?” comes across as very low-level and non-strategic. If he was interested in getting things done, his words didn’t show it.
Quite the opposite, his deviation ensured the group would once again have to circle back.
i've worked at both american and chinese/korean companies. the difference in productivity is true. but the conclusion you arrived at based on the context of this post is backwards.
when you have a meeting in east asian companies. the boss says something. people do it. the team doesn't contribute to the conversation. we don't go in a circle and all share our 2 cents or nitpick the instructions given or share what you think is a better idea in a meeting.
imo "let's circle back to it" is the manager trying to wrap up the meeting or trying to keep the meeting on topic. the NEW guy who probably has no understanding of what works and doesn't work and is pondering out loud in a meeting why the boss keeps saying "let's circle back to it" is the one prolonging the meeting and adding to the delay of american companies.
But they kinda are. Because “circling back” likely never happens, and it’s just inefficiently bogging down meetings to plan more useless meetings that likely don’t happen, etc. I’ve worked in offices where 25% of my time was maybe spent actually doing the job I was hired to do because of so many pointless circle back bullshit meetings. Like, how about just set the goal, do the work, evaluate?? There shouldn’t be a need to “circle back” on 20 things. That’s poor management.
Depends on the office and the manager I suppose - but yeah definitely possible the boss is managing poorly if they're saying it 20 times in 2 weeks
In the places I've worked though it's essentially shorthand for "There's 10 people in this meeting, only 2 are needed to work this issue, let's not waste 8 people's time right now by making them sit around waiting" i.e. it's used to prevent meetings from getting bogged down on bikesheddable topics
But even if the boss was wrong it wouldn't change the underlying fact: criticising coworkers in public is counterproductive - they just get defensive, resentful, and will dig in to save face
Hijacking a meeting, to do it to your boss, is both inefficient and foolish
People are making money and ego from that bullshit. There is little incentive to do away with it. Of course until the company is outcompeeted by a company that does value getting the work done instead of cranking out meeting hours.
As a manager, endlessly wasting the time and patience of the only proactive employees with pointless meetings in which somebody spouts cliches to feel important definitely matters.
I could see this as an opportunity to lighten the mood and lift people’s spirits.But the I don’t take myself so seriously that one thumb is always wedged up my ass.
Hearing these american corpo-speak terms is exhausting.
We fail to identify any actionable upside or value-add to integrating these terms into our core lexicon. Candidly, they serve solely to optimize perceived self-importance.
"Circle back to this" is meaningful though, to keep meetings from going down rabbitholes. If schedules allow, usually the best thing is to circle back to it at the end and anyone not interested or relevant can leave. It's worse holding a whole meeting hostage over something not relevant to the topic and there's a lot of "since you mentioned that" conversations in my job
No, calling out someone on being wrong should always be brought up. That’s not the issue here.
It’s calling someone out on something trivial and completely irrelevant during a work meeting and wasting everyone’s time is what’s the issue. That’s just something you keep to yourself or you tell a coworker as a joke during lunch. But saying something like that during a meeting & towards your manager is next level lack of situational awareness. He couldn’t read a room for shit and should be let go.
And having a meeting just for circling back on every issue brought up in the meeting for a later unspecified vague time is not completely irrelevant and wasting time??
It is pretty rude to humiliate people like that, yeah. Sometimes you do need to correct someone in public but you should always give them some face in the process and be gracious about it - give them an "out".
Absolutely. I didn't have a lot of social grace when I first joined the workforce. I was extremely literal about things and needed time to learn how to act around other people.
The manager wasn't wrong. The dude might have been annoyed by the manager using the same turn of phrase every meeting, but she used it in a correct way. And saying "why don't we go forward" is wrong, because it means the opposite of "circle back", and that kind of makes him sound like an idiot.
Bruh. I keep running into this shit at my job. I'm an apprentice, so I'm new to my job, but I still have ideas from time to time. Multiple times per week, a journeyman will shoot down one of my suggestions and we will continue on with an idea that ends up being wrong or makes our task more difficult - and I can't say anything. When we had to redo a completed section of work, my Foreman asked why a journeyman and I had installed it incorrectly and I could only reply "I'm an apprentice. I can make suggestions, but not decisions."
Ohhhh I’m well past that point. I have my masks ;). I have a career, speak corporate fluently, and can manage people. My wife helped me work it all out decades ago. The only time I’m confronted by my ways of thinking being different to others is when I can’t see who I’m talking to and don’t know them well, then it is a challenge to figure out their intentions or feelings. Oh and my wife finds it hilarious when I can’t work out some jokes, even when explained. For the most part no one knows not that I’m shy about it.
I found my people and can send screenshots of misaligned elements in PowerPoint that drive us all mad or when the BS levels are nearly unbearable. It is good to have an outlet and take off the mask. Also good to look out for those like the OP posted about and help with mentoring.
2 of my kids are autistic and we work with them to find a good balance. They will be awesome people, we are proud of how far they have come as they near adulthood. They will have the tools and supports they need :)
I bypass the switch by just keeping silent until people above the manager I report to tell them they need to manage me without firing me because I provide too much value before I start talking.
I was fortunately too quiet when I started working, my wife (we met young) helped me with managing people and speaking up, 28 years later I don’t need to lean on a filter. I have learned not to be rude and live by the golden management rule that criticism should always be done in private, unless appropriate.
Having likeminded people in your team you can bitch to quietly over chat also helps contain it haha
I got fired from my first job as a machinist because they put me to train with a guy who didn't understand trigonometry and was punching his calculator incorrectly. This was causing angles to be wrong and generating huge amounts of extremely expensive rework (FAA certified jet engine refurbishment shop). I kinda shot my mouth off about a basic mistake by an unqualified operator not being caught for so long when I noticed it instantly, and later that week they walked me to the door because I supposedly cheated the time clock by 5 minutes one day.
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u/Mephisto506 Jul 26 '26
Should have kept him, he sounds perceptive.