Episode #330: How Well Do You Prepare For The Q&A When Presenting?

The beauty of being the presenter is that for the majority of the time we are dominant, the lord or mistress of all we survey, we are the big shot. We can craft the speech anyway we wish and deliver it as we see fit. We control the content, the pacing, the delivery, the engagement with the audience. Things can a sudden turn for the worse though, when we utter these fateful words, “We have 20 minutes for Q&A and who has the first question?”. Suddenly we have entered the world of the bare-knuckle street fight, with no rules and no quarter given. The audience members can say whatever they like and we cannot control them.

Knowing that we can go from hero to zero in record time if we make a mess of the Q&A, are we taking it seriously enough? I was reminded of the importance of preparation recently. My son had a job interview to complete and the amount of preparation he did was impressive. He did a thorough analysis of what he would bring to the firm and he came up with about twenty questions he anticipated they would ask him. He enlisted me to be his training partner on numerous occasions and ask the questions and then pass on my feedback. By the time he got to the interview he was fully prepared and even then they asked him questions he wasn’t anticipating and had to deal with them on the fly.

I was reflecting on this and comparing with what I usually do when I prepare my talks. I plan the talks very thoroughly and I do rehearse them, but I realised I was a bit light on my preparation for the Q&A. “Once over lightly” would be a good descriptor. This is a bit curious though because in a public talk we are launching forth with our personal and professional brands and putting our goods out there for all to see. Normally I do list up what I think will be the most likely questions and then that is it. I don’t spend any time constructing my answers, as I rely on my knowledge of the subject and my presentation skills to enable me to handle whatever comes at me. I have fallen into the Comfort Zone trap of making “being good” the enemy of “being great”.

I have seen speakers destroyed by questions they couldn’t handle. They were doing so well up until the Q&A exposed a weakness in their professional capability and it shone a light on their credibility, bringing it into question. I haven’t suffered that ignominy as yet, but maybe that has just been a lucky run? When we do practice our question handling with a partner we have to be very careful how we do that. Most people are not very skilled at this stuff and their advice can sometimes be harmful or demotivating. We need to project confidence and being fully prepared for the main talk and the Q&A will help with that aim. We also need to prepare our partner by asking them to give us very specific feedback. We want to know (a) what we did well and (b) how could we make it even better.

As much as we may do this, the first response of most people is to start weighing in with their critique of what we didn’t do well. This is where we need to introduce some discipline. The moment they start to criticise you, politely stop them and then redirect them to follow your original guidelines and tell you the good/better answer you are seeking. Looking backwards is no help and we need to project forward and determine our future state, rather than having someone drag us backwards to a place we cannot change.

The other issue with preparation is to not sound robotic or too prepared. Our delivery should be conversational and seemingly spontaneous. It isn't spontaneous in the least because we have drilled the answers thoroughly but we don’t want to come across like that. When we are asked the question, do not nod your head as if you are agreeing with the speaker. We can do this unconsciously, trying to be affable. We don’t know what they will ask, so we don’t want to be seen nodding to a very combustible question, as if we agree with it, so let’s have no head nodding while we listen carefully to what they are saying.

Many speakers then give the entire answer to the questioner and keep their focus on the one person. Instead, we spend the first six seconds of our answer giving them eye contact and then we switch our gaze and start giving six seconds of eye contact to others in the audience. We want to be inclusive so let’s use the baseball diamond method of six pockets - left, center and right field, as well as inner field and outer field. Naturally we don’t spread our eye contact around in a geometric pattern which is predictable. We mix it up and we catch people unawares as we address the answer to as many members of the audience as we can. In this way we can engage the entire audience with our answer and we try to deliver it in a casual, relaxed “good bedside manner”.