As we continue examining your workplace presentations to see if they suck or not, let’s turn to an often-under prepared part of your total message – handling audience questions.
Your Q&A session might suck if you don’t consider that what they ask and how you respond can make or break your credibility, impact your confidence and influence your outcomes.
Your Q&A session will definitely suck if you can’t anticipate and plan for 90% of the questions 90% of the audience will ask 90% of the time. For best results, answer as many of those obvious questions as you can during your actual message. By dealing with anticipated questions – especially the difficult ones – up front, you display confidence and a higher level of audience focus.
Beyond those questions you answered up front or anticipated, presenters generally use one of two opposite strategies for handling audience questions – asking them to hold questions until the end of the presentation or inviting them anytime. Each has relative advantages and disadvantages:
Questions at the End
This is clearly an audience management tactic, especially useful for less experienced or confident presenters or when the topic is controversial. The advantages include:
- Limiting interruptions and getting off track.
- Minimizing the probability that your presentation will quickly disintegrate into a confrontation or argument.
- Avoiding dealing with questions that will be answered during the remainder of the presentation and
- Controlling your time.
But, questions at the emight suck if you fall victim to one or more of these disadvantages:
- Holding them until the end limits your capacity to deal with audience feedback and react accordingly.
- Some people will interrupt you with questions no matter what you ask them to do.
- Most importantly, the audience remembers most what they hear last. Even with a smooth and focused message, your Q&A will automatically be less so.
Questions Anytime
Here, it’s a presenter image tactic, suggesting that you can handle anything they can throw at you and almost daring them to try. Not something for the rookies or faint of heart. Besides projecting that image of confidence, other advantages include:
- Treating questions as feedback and being able to revise plans in midstream.\
- Being perceived as more audience-friendly and responsive.
- Encouraging more dialogue and audience engagement and less lecturing.
But, questions anytime might suck if it causes you to:
- Get off target, especially early on.
- Go over time limits.
- Lose control, especially with very vocal, opinionated or discourteous people.
- Respond to questions about Sub-Point C’s content during Sub-Point A.
Choosing which strategy to use is not an easy decision because neither one works best for all presenters, all messages and all audiences. But there are two ways out of this dilemma, two hybrid strategies that involve the best features of both approaches … Interested? Intrigued? Then be sure to read the September issue of ‘Communicate Confidently!’ to learn all about these options and strategies for how you respond.
For now … any questions?