Tactical empathy gets taught as a move for whoever already holds the upper hand. The negotiator across the table. The executive who called the meeting. Most people who need it at work are in the opposite position, asking a manager to move a date they did not set, or telling a report that the project they built is being cut.
The Black Swan Group, which trains people in the method, defines Tactical Empathy® with no warmth in it at all: “Tactical Empathy is all about understanding the other side.” Not agreement. Not sympathy. You do it so that “you can gain valuable information so you see things how they do, particularly when you don’t agree with them.” It sits inside emotional intelligence and it is the least soothing part of it.
Their founder, Chris Voss, is a former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator and the author of Never Split the Difference (2016, with Tahl Raz).
What follows is 12 phrases, each tied to a specific moment, each sorted by who is saying it to whom. The words are frequently identical in both directions. The risk is not.
This post is about direction, which is what the same sentence costs when you aim it up rather than down; cooling a conversation that has already gone hot is a different job, and seven de-escalation moves covers that one.
What tactical empathy does, and why direction changes the risk
Every phrase below does one of two jobs. It names what the other person is dealing with, or it hands them a decision they can safely say no to. Both slow a conversation at exactly the point where it usually speeds up.
Matthew Lieberman’s team at UCLA found that putting a feeling into words reduced amygdala response to negative images, in Psychological Science in 2007. Their participants were in a scanner picking the word that described an emotional face, and the reading that dropped was the labeller’s own, so read it as a reason the move is plausible rather than proof that a label calms the person you aim it at.
Said upward, to the person who writes your review, a label that lands wrong reads as insubordination. Said downward, the same label reads as a verdict, and nobody argues with a verdict from their manager. They just stop talking.
The 12 phrases, sorted by direction: up to your manager, down to your report
Up means you are the individual contributor. Down means you are the manager. Six of these are shown in both directions. Six appear once. If you want a baseline before you start using any of them, the conflict resolution assessment takes about ten minutes.
1. “It sounds like the real problem here is the timeline, not the output.”
Up. Your estimate has just been called unrealistic in a planning meeting.
Manager: “Six weeks for this isn’t realistic.”
You: “It sounds like the real problem here is the timeline, not the output.”
Manager: “The timeline is fixed.”
You: “Then the question is which parts of the output are fixed with it.”
Down. Third slipped commitment from the same person, and they get defensive the moment you ask.
You: “It sounds like the real problem here is the timeline, not the output.”
Report: “No. The timeline was fine. I’ve been covering the support rota since Mark left.”
The label was wrong. A wrong label gets corrected fast, and the correction is the information you came for. The rota problem outlasted that conversation by a quarter. It resolved when a backfill started, not because of anything either of them said in the room.
Move 3 of our de-escalation guide covers the wording that makes a label easy to correct. What changes with direction is who can afford to correct you.
2. “How am I supposed to make that work?”
Up. Your manager adds a client ask worth two unscoped weeks, mid-sprint.
Down. You add the escalation queue to a report’s sprint.
Said up, it returns the tradeoff to the person who created it, without you refusing anything. Said down, it hands the report the problem with no order attached, which is the only way most people will tell you the real answer. Delivered fast, or flat, it becomes an accusation in both directions.
3. “Help me understand how this decision got made.”
Up. A reorg splits your team across two new managers. You find out at an all-hands.
This asks for the reasoning. You are very unlikely to get the decision changed at that point. You are quite likely to get told who actually made it, which is who you need next.
4. Repeat their last three words back, as a question
Up. Your manager says, post-reorg, “This is just how the team operates now.” You say: “How the team operates now?”
Down. Your report says, “Nobody tells me anything until it’s already decided.” You say: “Already decided?”
Up, mirroring buys you time without contradicting anyone, which matters when contradicting is expensive. Down, it pulls the rest of the sentence out, and the rest of the sentence is almost always one specific incident with a date on it.
5. “What would need to be true for this deadline to work?”
Down. Two days before launch, your report tells you the date is impossible.
It moves the conversation off whether they are right and onto the list of missing conditions. Sometimes that list is short. Sometimes writing it down is the proof that the date was never real, which is a better thing to take upstairs than a disagreement.
6. “You probably think I’m just trying to get out of this.”
Up. You are asking for an extension the sprint after you already missed one. Say the worst available read of you out loud, before your manager has to think it: “You probably think I’m trying to get out of this, and last sprint makes that fair.” Then make the request. The sentence they were assembling is now already on the table, said by you, and they have to respond to your version of it.
Down. You are extending a report’s performance plan by 30 days. “You’re going to hear this as the company building a paper trail.” That is the fear every performance plan creates, and declining to name it does not make it go away. Naming it does not make the extension good news either. It makes the next twenty minutes about the plan instead of about the subtext. Some of those people leave anyway.
7. “Am I right that the priority is speed over correctness this time?”
Up. Your manager and your skip-level have given you contradicting instructions on one deliverable.
Ask the one you report to. Naming which instruction you are following puts the contradiction on record without making you the person who announced that two leaders disagree.
8. “What am I doing that’s making this harder than it needs to be?”
Down. A reliable report starts missing standups after a peer was promoted over them.
It concedes that some of it might be you, which is the only version of this question anyone can answer honestly. Expect “nothing” the first time. Ask again in the next check-in.
9. “Is now a bad time to talk about this?”
Up. You need twenty minutes from a manager who has cancelled your last three check-ins.
Down. You have to tell a report their pet project is cut.
A question shaped for “no” costs nothing to decline, so it tends to get declined into a yes. Down, it does something different: it hands the person a small piece of control in the ten seconds before you take a much larger one away.
10. “I’m not going to pretend I have an answer for that right now.”
Down. A Slack rumour about layoffs, and your report asks you point blank.
Not “I can’t comment,” which sounds like yes. Not “nothing is happening,” which is a promise you may have to break by Friday. This one is accurate about the shape of what you know.
11. Paraphrase it back until they say “that’s right”
Not “I understand,” which is you talking about you. You repeat what they said, in your own words, until they confirm it.
Up. Your manager is venting about board pressure after a bad quarter. “So the board moved the target in February, you argued for the original plan, and now the number you’re being held to is one you pushed back on.” If you get “that’s right,” you have earned room to disagree about something else in the next ten minutes. That is usually what you came in for.
Down. Your report is venting about being passed over for a promotion. Here the confirmation is often the entire intervention. The promotion is still gone, and the conversation still goes better than it would have. You are not solving it. You are making sure they do not have to explain it twice.
12. “I can commit to that if we drop the analytics rebuild to make room.”
Up. Your manager adds a deliverable in a status meeting and removes nothing.
Say it in the meeting. The same sentence sent in Slack an hour later is a complaint, because the people who heard the ask are no longer in the room to hear the tradeoff.
Where tactical empathy backfires in both directions
“It sounds like you’re frustrated with the schedule.” Daniel, an illustrative composite of managers we coach, said that four sentences into his report’s complaint about the on-call rota. He was right about the frustration. He was also three sentences early.
When managers first try labels like these, we see the same pattern: the right words, delivered mid-interruption, before the other person has finished the sentence.
A label dropped on top of someone still talking tells them you were waiting for a gap rather than listening for content, and people hear that distinction instantly. Active listening sits underneath all twelve of these, and no phrase list can supply it. If you are running out of patience before the other person finishes, these phrases give your impatience a professional-sounding shape and nothing else.
The six phrases shown in only one direction
That is numbers 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 and 12. None of them are stuck there.
Take number 5. Said down, “what would need to be true for this deadline to work” is a manager opening a scoping conversation. Said up, to the person who set the deadline, it is the same sentence with a different bill attached: you are asking someone senior to enumerate the conditions of their own commitment, out loud, in front of whoever else is in the meeting. It still works. It costs more, and it costs you rather than them, which is the calculation nobody makes for you.
That calculation is the skill. The 12 lines are what it produced this time, for these moments. Which direction you are speaking in changes the price of every one of them, which is why Risely builds separately for individual contributors and for new managers. The conflict management masterclass runs four weeks live in a small cohort, and saying one of these to someone who pushes back is the part a phrase list cannot give you.
To practise the translation on a conversation you are actually about to have, Merlin will run it with you beforehand, for free.
Start with number 10. Your manager asks you point blank, in front of two other people, whether your project ships on the 14th. You genuinely do not know. You already have the sentence. Only the direction has changed.