Mastering the question-and-answer portion of any public-speaking appearance or presentation is critical to ensuring your audience walks away confident in your expertise, convinced of your main point and willing to accept your call to action. Ace the Q&A, and you are a winner. Fumble answering questions, and you may end up a loser.
That is why we are spending so much time on this portion of your presentation. We have already looked at how to prepare for Q&A in this blog post as well how to invite questions from the audience (here). In the last post (here) we started going through some practical tips on handling the questions.
Now let’s look at how to handle hostile questions and rambling questioners.
No matter how well you do your presentation or how benign the topic is, there is always the chance that an audience member will ask a hostile or rude question. Note that I am not talking about a polite question that is critical of your main point or some other part of your presentation, but a question that is downright hostile and rude.
In a company presentation, the person asking the hostile question may be a rival to you or your supervisor, or a top executive who for reasons undisclosed wants to undercut you. Some workplaces seem to have that person who believes it is his duty to play “devil’s advocate,” which in his eyes means pointing out anything that could possibly be negative about your presentation. Or it could a supervisor has caught Hell from above and feels the need the need to lash out.
In a public presentation, there may be an audience member with an agenda or who simply woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
Stay Calm
The No. 1 thing you must do in that situation is remain calm.
Keep a bland expression on your face and give the same “Thank you” response to the hostile questioner as you did to anyone else.
Remember, you are on stage and you need to be seen as in control of the situation. Reacting poorly by making a face or allowing hesitation in your voice may undercut your authority with the audience.
Any indication of hostility toward the questioner may make you appear to be a bully, since you are running the show.
So keep a calm expression, say “thank you,” and look away from the hostile questioner to the rest of the audience.
Just as with any other question, you want to repeat it to make sure the entire audience heard it and to buy yourself some time to think of a response.
But in the case of a hostile question, you want to rephrase the question to neutralize the sting. Take the rudeness out and rephrase the question in such a way that you could answer it while emphasizing your stand.
Then immediately go into your answer before the questioner can interrupt. If your audience is big enough, do not look back to the questioner at all. Focus on other audience members completely.
As you finish, pick a questioner on the other side of the room and keep your attention off the hostile person so you do not get into a back-and-forth situation.
Of course, if the questioner is your supervisor or some other higher-up, you will have no choice but to allow him to ask follow-up questions.
But otherwise ignore him completely, no matter how much he waves his hand.
Here’s an example of how to neutralize a hostile question:
Question:
“I’m looking at the numbers for your proposal and you are just wasting our time. It’s stupid to think we would allocate that much to you. Are you crazy?”
Response:
“Thank you.” Turn to the rest of the gathering. “The question is, how do we justify the amount of funding. Here are the benefits that more than offset the costs…”
If you know your subject well enough, you should be able to pull out a kernel from any hostile question that you can turn to your benefit.
And the best way to do that is stay calm.
Rambling Questioners
Your Q-and-A session can be derailed by a questioner who wants to run his mouth and can’t get to the point. Someone with an agenda could hijack it for her own purposes or to spout her own opinion, whether it is pertinent to your presentation or not.
Allowing a rambler to take over undercuts your authority with the audience and could undermine its confidence in you. If that happens, your audience may ignore your call to action or walk away unconvinced of your main point.
To be clear, at a company presentation Bosses and higher-ups, unfortunately, are allowed to go on and on before making their point or asking a question. You really can’t cut them off. When this happens, make sure you show you are paying attention and not showing any impatience.
Then proceed to answer the question as you would any other.
With a general audience, the ramblers tend to fall into two categories: Those who want to use the occasion as their own platform and those who just can’t seem to articulate their question.
In either situation, you should feel free to politely take control.
With the person who is pontificating rather than asking a question, it is fine to politely cut in and say something along the lines of, “Excuse me. That is interesting and I’ll be glad to discuss it with you afterwards. But we only have so much time and others may have questions as well. If you have a question, please ask it now.”
Saying something like this allows you to be respectful while being mindful of the rest of the audience. The audience almost certainly will appreciate your move.
With someone who is having a hard time articulating the question, you should wait until she has said enough that you get the gist. Then, again, be polite and cut in with something along these lines: “Excuse me. I think what you are asking is about XYZ? Should I go ahead and answer that?”
Again, the audience will appreciate your action.
In the next post we will discuss what happens when you get a question that you can’t answer.
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