Answering questions honestly and deftly is an important skill for any leader, educator, or facilitator.
Answering questions establishes trust within the group, sets the tone for the space, and can communicate how open (or closed) we are to challenge, curiosity, and confusion from the group.
There is a level of self-discipline it takes to do well and skills that we can build up to get better and better at answering questions over time.
Know Your Goal
The goal of answering questions is to give people the information they are looking for. We can also use them to reinforce the experience we want people to have in our sessions and the approach we’re taking to the content.
When we’re able to respond in ways that are gracious, educational, and helpful, the group will naturally be more inclined to pay attention, understand, and trust the scope of our knowledge.
It’s also easy to break trust if we respond in irritation, roll our eyes, or start our answers with, “Obviously…”. Participants will intake our verbal cues and body language to forecast future interactions.
It’s About What THEY Want to Know
One of the hardest things for folks who are incredibly passionate content experts is knowing when to stop talking.
It’s easy to give people too much information.
Imagine that the information we’re giving someone is a physical object. Every piece of information we hand them is another thing they have to hold onto. If we overload them, they might not just drop the last few pieces we gave them, they might drop the whole thing.
If someone asks a yes or no question… our first response should be a yes or no answer.
If we then want to elaborate (or better yet, the participant wants you to!) we can. But start with the smallest piece of information that answers their question.
Remember, when we are inviting people to ask questions, it’s about their needs and not what we find most interesting. There is a balance to strike, but we need to land on “what is this person looking for” and not “what do I want to tell them”.
Take Questions Seriously
Answer all questions as if the person asking them is genuinely interested (even when you suspect they’re not).
It can be easy to dismiss someone as just playing devil’s advocate, but so often with questions, even if the asker isn’t curious about the answer, someone else in the room does sincerely have that question. Therefore we think it’s important to respond as if that’s always true.
Sometimes we’ve found it helpful to reimagine the person who is asking a bad faith question as someone we really care about or have a lot of patience for, which allows us to be more generous in our response.
There’s a Bit of Math Involved
Do the math ahead of time and figure out how many questions you can answer in the time you have.
If you spend 5 minutes answering one question you’re going to get through fewer questions.
It’s so tempting to give thorough answers at the beginning but you’ll end up rushing through some important ones at the end, so we like to set timers or keep a stopwatch going on our phones throughout to keep us on pace, allowing us to give each question it’s due.
Set Yourself Up for Success
Rather than doing unstructured Q&A, we like to either use Anonymous Q&A or Frequently Asked Questions for the Q&A section of our agendas.
Anonymous Q&A
We use this structure when :
- We want to field as many questions as possible from the group
- We aren’t sure what they’ll be curious about in regard to the content ahead of time
- We want more questions than we’ll be able to get to at that moment to help us shape future offerings, resources, or event the remainder of the session
For more on how we like to do Anonymous Q&A you can read a whole post about it here!
Frequently Asked Questions
We use this structure when:
- We want to practice our answers ahead of time
- We want to limit the number of questions people might ask
- We have an understanding of what people will be curious (but hesitant) to ask ahead of time
You can read about the Frequently Asked Questions framework here and how we do it virtually here!
We think any Q&A session is improved with a little structure and these are powerful Facilitator Cards help to do just that.
Question & Answers Sessions are a cornerstone in workshops, meetings, and seminars. They provide a unique opportunity for in-the-moment feedback and with just a little bit of structure we can create the optimal situation to get earnest and important questions from all of our participants.