5 phrases that signal you belong in the room
Yasar Ahmad is a Global VP of HR with 15 years of executive experience. He recently shared a TikTok about five phrases that make senior leaders take you seriously. He wasn't talking explicitly about IC, but it sure felt like he was.
Communicators are often the most experienced people in any given meeting about messaging, change, or employee trust. And yet, the “seat at the table” still feels earned meeting by meeting. These phrases won't change that overnight, but they shift how you're perceived when it counts.
Here's what Yasar suggested, filtered through an IC lens.
"What's the outcome we're optimizing for?"
Say this early, before the deck gets shared or the talking points get drafted. It reframes your role from "the person who writes things" to "the person who asks whether we're solving the right thing." Leaders notice.
It also does something practical: it slows the room down. Meetings about communication often sprint straight to format and channel before anyone has agreed on what success looks like. This question puts the brakes on that, and it puts you in the driver's seat of a more useful conversation."I want to make sure we're solving the right problem."
This one is practically the IC profession's thesis statement. Half the time, communicators get handed a brief for a problem that was already poorly defined upstream. The ask is "write an email announcing this change." The actual problem is that employees don't trust leadership's decisions. Those require very different responses.
Saying this out loud, in the room, before work begins, is far better than discovering the misalignment after three rounds of revisions. It also signals that you're thinking about impact, not just output."What are we measuring as success?"
IC has a measurement problem, and a lot of it starts here. Campaigns launch without anyone establishing what a good result actually looks like. Then six weeks later, someone asks if it worked, and the answer is a shrug and an open rate.
Asking this question before the work starts forces that conversation early. It also shifts the perception of IC from a production function to a results-oriented one. You're not asking because you need a number to hit. You're asking because you already think in terms of outcomes."Who else needs to be in this conversation?"
This signals stakeholder awareness, which senior leaders read as maturity. It shows you're not just thinking about your deliverable; you're thinking about what happens downstream.
For IC specifically, it's also a bit self-serving in the best way. Asking who else needs to be involved is often how communicators get looped in earlier on future work. You're modeling the behavior you want others to apply to you."Let me take that away and come back with a recommendation."
Yasar's note here is worth repeating: don't ask what to do. Say you'll figure it out and bring back an answer. The IC nuance is in the word "recommendation," singular. Not three options for leadership to pick from. A point of view.
Offering options feels collaborative, but it often reads as indecisive. When you come back with a recommendation, you're acting like a strategic advisor, not an order taker. That's a different relationship, and it's one worth building.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
August 27, 2026 · Sioux Falls, SD
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