that’s not what I meant

Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast number 188, “Correcting Misunderstandings at Work.”

This is English as a Second Language Podcast episode 188. I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in the beautiful city of Los Angeles, in the wonderful state of California.

On this podcast, we're going to be correcting some mistakes that other people make. When you have a conversation and you need to tell someone they made a mistake or they are wrong, you need to do that politely, and today we'll find out how. Let's get started.

I work in our company’s Toledo office and I was meeting with my counterpart in our Raleigh office. I was trying to explain to her our new proposal to make some changes in the corporate structure. But, it wasn’t going very well.

Rory: So, with the new plan, the managers would report directly to the CEO?

Dean: That’s not quite right. The local managers would report to the regional managers, and the regional managers would be supervised by the COO. That would give the COO more oversight than he has now.

Rory: You’re saying, then, that the managers aren’t being well supervised now?

Dean: No, that’s not what I meant. We were actually thinking that the new plan would