Handling Internal Audience Q&A And Characters — Presenting for Impact

Following up from the previous post, a lot of what you learn depends on how you receive and react to Audience Q&A.

All members of an audience are not the same whether they are internal or external. For this post, let’s look at Internal Audience.

Internal audience could be harder depending on whether it is just your team, or your managers, or the company at large.

When you go into a meeting — assume you have prepared the content well and you are confident… you get expected questions and you answer them well.

Every now and then there is this senior person in the team who throws a curveball. Now, you did not envisage this question.

Here a couple of things could happen -

• You came in confident, so look down on the question or over answer the question with all the knowledge you have. The person who asked the question isn’t impressed. He either corners you with follow-up questions and it goes into a loop forcing someone else to suggest you should probably take this question offline.
• Possible way to deal with it — First, take a minute to understand the question. With humility, assume that this person knows more than you and see if there are follow-up slides(if you aren’t done with all the slides you wanted to present) addressing that or not. If you have not addressed that anywhere, try to understand the intent of the question and then propose that you will take the question and give better clarity offline. Before suggesting to take it offline, convey that you have reasonably understood their question.

Another common overlooked pitfall:

Most often than not, people assume that those junior in the audience will know less than them. But I have seen many times that this is a bad assumption and we shouldn’t be judgemental. Any time a junior person in the audience asks a question — take it as a chance to understand him. The only way it is constructive is when you assume that it is possible for even the most junior person in the audience to know something you don’t know. If you go with this mindset, you can help the learning cause as well as get an admirer whom you might end up working with later.

In general, when there is a question, the standard response should start with ‘That is a good question or I am glad you asked that question’ — Not because you want to please that person but it is good way to show you are prepared for that question. It builds an unseen bond with that person.

Key to good presentation-End-result lies in Preparation(Always!):

Preparation ahead of the actual meeting is as critical as the presentation itself. Here I am not talking about the content alone but the delivery(meeting). Prep or Dry-Run is the key. It takes time to do this before the actual meeting but it helps in many ways. Work with those ‘not so easy’ audience members(be it a senior person)or someone who knows that this ‘senior’ person will ask such questions to help you better prepare for those meetings.

It is possible that you are not going to cover those segments but it will help you, during this prep/dry-run meetings to become aware and add scope slides to your presentation, thereby averting potential dead-lock conversations.

Feed on the character(s) in the audience(and sometimes to their ‘ego’)

I have found it helps to connect people in the audience during your presentation. It could be who you worked with for the presentation, in your team. It could be leads or managers(direct or indirect) who have an interest in this space. It could be hard-to-please colleagues who have an ‘outlook’ on their superiority of the topic you are planning to present. In talking to them, you should consciously pick on cues or phrases they use. Use them in your meeting(if it helps) and attribute to them during the talk.

Here, you are doing two things — feeding on the character or ego but at the same time you are communicating that its team work. For me, it is critical to quote people’s names because it’s always teamwork!

You should always be aware of the personalities in your audience- Who you are looking to convince and who you will have trouble with. People are not bad, but their point of view will not be the same as yours. You can only learn to improve or avoid, depending on the feedback.

Of course, there might be people who don’t care for what you have to say, you will learn to spot them over time and perhaps have a better insight to not get overworked with their questions or attitude.

Every presentation is an opportunity for you to impact someone either with your knowledge or character. Both go a long way in life.

Note:

If this applies to you — Good! Incorporate/adopt as much as possible!

If this doesn’t apply to you — Good! You are awesome!

If you did not learn anything new — Good! There will be other things you might learn, keep coming back!