In our Presentation Skills training course the subject of how to handle Question and Answer sessions can be greeted with anything from sunny optimism to doom laden dread.
Some people look forward to them as a welcome relief from having to hold court alone and have the chance to enter into a more natural dialogue with their audience. For others there is a very real fear that questioners may be challenging or even hostile or, quite simply, leave the speaker completely at sea as to how to respond.
As trainers we spend our days handling questions and challenges. If we dreaded them we couldn’t possibly offer the high level of interactivity that we do, and all discussions would be fraught with tension. The stress level would be ghastly.
Questions are Vital
But questions are vital to the way we work. They mean people are awake (which is always a good sign) and engaged.
So we actively encourage questions and apart from a few sticky moments here or there where we have to get creative, on the whole, we enjoy sharing ideas and exploring different ways of looking at the world.
Our mission is to help people feel so good about asking questions that they all ask even more!
How do we go about handling them?