TJ Walker explains why speakers should answer audience questions live instead of saving them for later. Real-time Q&A boosts engagement, exposes gaps in your explanation, and proves you know your stuff. He shares tactics for managing difficult questioners and questions that come too early.
Chapters
The ultimate question about questions is how do you handle questions during a speech or presentation? You've always got to step back first and really analyze the broader situation. There are certain contexts that are highly relevant. If you're giving a political rally in front of 20,000 people and you're one of many speakers all day long and you've got exactly seven minutes, you can't take questions from the audience. People wouldn't hear it. They'd have to take five minutes to walk up to a microphone. You're just not going to be able to in that situation. Other times you're in a highly regulated environment. You're giving a pitch for a company going public. You've got exactly 15 minutes at some sort of financial conference. Things are structured where questions happen at the end. So there may be times when you can't take questions. I understand that. However, in my experience, the vast, vast majority of speaking opportunities most people have in business, in government, in civic life, you're not speaking to 25,000 people, you're speaking to 25 people. It's not a specific five minute rigid time constraint. It may be, speak as long as you need to. It could be 5 minutes to 25 minutes at your meeting. You're in charge. My default recommendation when it comes to questions is answer them in real time. People say, well, yeah, T.J. that's disrupting my flow. That's out of my order. You're upsetting my presentation. And my answer to you is, guess what? It's not your presentation, it's the audience's presentation. There's nothing in the world I love more than when I'm speaking to a small group and people interrupt me with questions because they're not interrupting, they're actually adding to the experience for everyone in the room. If this person over here is asking me a question, it may be because I wasn't clear. She may be thinking what's on the minds of everyone else in the room. There's so many advantages to taking a question live right when you're speaking to people because it shows you're listening to them. It creates variety in the room. Now people are hearing different voices. I now know whatever I say in answer to her question, she's going to be 100% interested in it because it's completely responsive to the number one thing on her agenda at that moment. And it's going to be interesting. There's a better chance it's interesting to other people in the room. Now, someone could always ask just a stupid, irrelevant question. The other value of it is. It shows people you know your stuff. You're not just coming here reading off some canned speech or something you memorized. You're showing you're in the moment. It is truly interactive. Everyone talks about being interactive. Oh, Facebook is better than all these other websites because it's more interactive. Well, the beauty of a speech or presentation is it's interactive because you can actually listen to people's questions and respond to them directly. And it may be you need to change the order. They're about to ask you something that you are going to cover five minutes from now. Go ahead and answer it now. Unless what you were talking about doesn't make sense unless you lay out several other points along the way. You can always say, harriet, thanks for asking that. I am going to answer that in about five minutes. But it's not going to make sense unless I first talk about. And then lay out the structures is one way of handling it. Now, every once in a while, you may have someone who tries to hijack a meeting and show everybody how smart they are and ask a whole bunch of questions. They may even be good questions. But then it does become disruptive. What I like to do in a situation like that is say, hey, Jim, your questions are so critically important. I want to give them the time they deserve. So I want to meet with you in the back of the room as soon as I finish at the coffee pot. And we will go over that in detail and anyone else interested can join us there. So I'm not saying shut up already, you're going on. I'm being respectful and I will, in fact, go talk to the person. I would also get other people's questions before I let someone else ask a second or third or fourth. Don't let any person dominate. But in general, someone asking questions is a good thing. It shows they're listening, so they're trying to understand. It shows they're not zoning out and just checking email. That's always a good sign. So celebrate it, rejoice it. Don't say, write your questions down. Hold all questions till the end because people are going to forget. And then you're about as interactive as a CBS News video on their website, where they don't even let you have comments on it. Don't be like that. Rejoice and embrace questions from your audience. I'm T.J. walker. If you have any questions, please post them right here. I'm not here with you live today, but I will listen to those questions. I'll read them, and I'll probably do a video on them in the next few weeks, so please post your questions.
