Question everything! Tackling presentation questions

My corporate clients are always clear about one thing: they need to improve their presentation skills. What they’re less sure of is what that actually means. Things such as ‘confidence’ and ‘all those small tricks you can do on PowerPoint’ come up without much active elicitation or needs analysis. The former is something that you at least hope you can address through the process of exposure and practice; the latter, an issue that is often constrained by how generous the client’s IT budget might be – especially in relatively resource-poor environments.

One concern that diagnostic testing often throws up, though, is confidence in handling questions – and it’s something that makes our team of instructors nervous, too, as the following comments demonstrate:

‘Unless you’re from a corporate training background, how do you handle questions on handling questions?’

‘What about the potential fallout in terms of group dynamics if one student’s question offends another student?’

‘What if a learner’s self-confidence is battered because, having struggled reluctantly through a presentation which in itself is outside their comfort zone, they just can’t answer the question posed?’

‘In classes where the point of teaching and practising presentations is to give the learners a sense of achievement, doesn’t a poorly-executed question and answer stage risk an anti-climax?’

I’ve found that the key to training learners to handle presentation questions is to:

1. have clear, ready-to-teach principles to hand on how they can answer questions effectively;
2. help the learners overcome their desire to avoid being put on the spot – without letting them off the hook entirely;
3. make the learners aware of the types of difficult questions that they might be asked – by taking advantage of their natural sense of mischief and competitive spirit.

The activities suggested below constitute the third-to-last in a series of lessons that leads up to a final ‘Presentation day’. Earlier lessons include training on paralinguistic features (vocal and visual) and presentation structure and content. In the penultimate lesson, the learners work in groups to plan a full presentation – with free choice over topic, based on professional interests – for the final day, including anticipating and preparing a strategy for difficult questions.

Barriers to confidence

Whether you are teaching a closed, corporate group or a class of general English students who have requested presentation training, key stumbling blocks with regard to confidence in asking and handling questions include:

• Fear of being rude to fellow learners: many learners just won’t want to question their peers.
• Answering spontaneously: dealing with questions is obviously more demanding and anxiety-inducing than delivering a prepared presentation.

One technique I’ve used to address these issues is by diving straight in and brainstorming irritating questions. This is how I stage this:

1. If the class is sufficiently well-gelled, we share experiences of being embarrassed in presentations.
2. We then think about what makes some questions so irritating – and how to categorise them. Four types of irritating question might be:

• Irrelevant questions
• Aggressive questions
• Questions that have already been answered
• Questions that undermine the whole presentation

1. Next, we look at the script of the end of a presentation as a class. This is normally on something slightly absurd, such as advocating a dinosaur theme for a hotel chain’s interior design, so that nobody can be accused of criticising somebody’s real work. In pairs, the learners then work together to come up with examples of each type of irritating question. You can download a handout with the text of the presentation and space for the students to write their questions at the bottom of this page.
2. I then tell the learners that I will deliver the presentation and invite their questions, but that my answers will be terrible, and I will ask them to identify where I went wrong. I answer their questions by completely falling apart, by being rude back, by waffling endlessly without focus, by repeating the presentation at length, and by being patronising. We then discuss why my approach was wrong, and how the learners think I could have answered the questions better.

Basic principles

At this stage, you can feed in some basic principles for handling any questions:

• Thank the questioner.
• Confirm that you’ve understood the question.
• Be clear about what you can and cannot answer or commit to now.
• End your answer with a clear link to the key point of your presentation.

Teaching these principles can be a really effective confidence-builder, especially for learners who are less confident in spontaneous spoken production – it focuses attention on the communicative skill of handling questions, rather than ‘how well I spoke’, and gives a clear formula to refer to.

Giving the students a few simple functional exponents to learn can make it easier for them to apply these principles, and these can easily be graded to suit any level:

Thank the questioner.

Thank you for your question.

I’m glad you asked that.

That’s an interesting point.

Confirm that you’ve understood the question.

Do you mean that …?

Are you referring to …?

So just to confirm, you’re asking about …?

Be clear about what you can and cannot answer or commit to now.

I won’t go into …

At this stage, I can’t commit to …

It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on …

End your answer with a clear link to the key point of your presentation.

Basically, it’s all about …

The key is to …

To reiterate my point, …

Presentation day

Proof of the pudding comes on ‘Presentation day’ itself! Brief the learners that, as well as delivering a presentation, they will also be answering questions – and that some of the questions will deliberately be irritating.

This gives the learners licence to be mean (in a controlled and supportive way, of course). Before each presentation, some of the learners discreetly take a card, inviting them to come up with an irritating question of one of the types practised – or a genuine question. You can download these cards from the ETp website at              www.etprofessional.com/media/31693/etp-118_questioneverything-p25.pdf  .

It’s tempting to avoid tackling the question and answer stage of a presentation, as it’s probably the single most anxiety-inducing moment of professional presentation delivery. However, tackling it head-on by anticipating common types of irritating questions, having clear principles for answering questions, and practising some useful expressions – and even injecting a bit of humour – does wonders in addressing a perennial concern.

Richard Buckley is a Professional Development Coordinator at British Council Myanmar. He previously taught on corporate and university programmes in Sudan, Japan and Indonesia. He has a special interest in preparing learners for intercultural communication in the workplace.

richard.buckley@mm.britishcouncil.org