Most managers who get access to Microsoft 365 Copilot use it for meeting summaries and stop there. That is understandable — meeting summaries are an obvious, immediate win — but it leaves the majority of Copilot's value untouched. The prompts below cover 10 of the highest-value use cases for managers: preparing for conversations, communicating clearly under time pressure, tracking project health, developing team members, and creating space for the strategic thinking that gets crowded out by operational noise.
Each prompt is written for real use. The placeholders in brackets are the only parts you change. Use them as written, adapt the structure to your context, and add them to a shared prompt library for your team.
Prepare for a 1:1
1:1 meetings are most useful when the manager has reviewed recent context before the conversation rather than arriving cold. This prompt uses Copilot's access to your shared Teams channels, emails, and documents to surface what has happened since your last conversation.
Pro tip: Run this 15 minutes before each 1:1. The output gives you a natural agenda and means you spend the conversation on what matters rather than catching up on operational status.
Distil a long email thread into a decision
Long email threads with multiple contributors frequently bury the actual decision point in a wall of replies. Copilot can extract what matters and frame it as an action item without you reading every message.
Pro tip: Use in Outlook by selecting the thread and opening Copilot in the email pane. For Teams threads, use the same prompt in the Teams Copilot chat.
Write a first draft of a performance review
Performance reviews are time-consuming and emotionally demanding to write. Copilot can produce a first draft from your bullet notes — which you then review for accuracy, tone, and completeness before finalising.
Pro tip: Always review the output for accuracy before sharing. Copilot is writing from your bullet notes, not from independent knowledge of the person — it will reflect exactly what you gave it, so the quality of your notes determines the quality of the review.
"The best prompt is not the cleverest one — it's the one that describes the task the way you would describe it to a smart new colleague who doesn't yet know your context."
Turn meeting notes into a project update
After a project review meeting, stakeholders want a concise update that tells them what has happened, what is coming next, and what they need to know or decide. This prompt turns your raw meeting notes into a shareable update in the right format.
Pro tip: Use the RAG rating placeholder deliberately — it forces you to make the status explicit before Copilot writes around it, which produces clearer, more honest updates.
Prepare for a difficult conversation
Difficult conversations — performance, conflict, redundancy — go better when the manager has a clear structure before entering them. This prompt helps you plan the conversation rather than improvise it.
Pro tip: Read the output before the conversation, not during it. The goal is to arrive with a clear mental model of how you want the conversation to go — not a script you are reading from.
Spot patterns in team workload
When you manage a team through Microsoft Teams, you can see signals of workload and wellbeing in how people communicate — but reading across multiple people's messages manually is impractical. Copilot can surface patterns you might otherwise miss.
Pro tip: Use this as a prompt for your own reflection, not as a monitoring tool. The output is a prompt for conversations you might want to have — not a performance record or HR document.
Draft a team communication clearly and quickly
Managers write more communications than most people realise — announcements, process changes, project launches, team updates. Each one deserves to be clear, appropriately toned, and to anticipate the questions people will ask. This prompt handles the first draft.
Pro tip: The tone instruction matters more than you might think. "Direct and positive" produces different language from "reassuring" — matching tone to the nature of the message is what makes team communications land well rather than feeling generic.
Build a development plan for a team member
Development plans are most useful when they combine immediate skill-building with medium-term career direction. This prompt produces a structured plan that you can review and refine with the team member in their next 1:1.
Pro tip: Share the draft with the team member before the development conversation, not during it. Coming to the conversation with a plan to react to is more productive than trying to build one in the room together.
Summarise a document before a senior meeting
Going into a senior leadership meeting — a board presentation, an exec review, a strategy session — prepared means knowing what is in the supporting documents. Copilot can summarise long documents into the structure your brain needs for a meeting.
Pro tip: Use in Word with a document attached, or paste the text into Copilot Chat. For PDF reports, use the Word version if available — Copilot's access to PDFs depends on your tenant configuration.
Catch up after time away
Returning after a holiday, a parental leave, or even a week of back-to-back travel and finding out what actually happened across your team and projects is one of the most time-consuming catches-up in a manager's calendar. Copilot can surface the material that matters and filter out the noise.
Pro tip: Run this before you open your email on return. Getting the structured summary first means you read your inbox with context rather than trying to build it email by email.
How to Write Better Prompts
The prompts above share a common structure that you can apply to any new use case. Every good prompt has four components:
- Role context — who you are and what you need this for ("I am preparing for a 1:1 with...")
- Specific task — what you want Copilot to do, described precisely ("summarise what they have been working on...")
- Key constraints — what must be included, what must be excluded, word count, tone
- Output format — how you want the response structured (bullet points, table, numbered list, prose)
Vague prompts produce vague outputs. The more specific you are about what you need and how you want it formatted, the more useful the response — and the less editing you will need to do.
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