In my recent webinar one of the participants, Rob asked an interesting question: when sitting on a board, what do you do if the business leaders consistently do not answer your questions?
He mentioned that he and other board members were finding this to be a problem: when asked a question, the leaders would ‘beat around the bush' and not answer it.
The key is to understand why they are not answering the questions and then to respond accordingly.
There could be all sorts of reasons why someone does not answer your question, but they would I think fall into three potential categories: they don't know the answer, they don't know how to provide the answer or they don't want to provide the answer.
In most instances, the problem is more likely to be caused by either not knowing the answer, or not knowing how to explain it succinctly, although not wanting to provide it can't be ruled out.
Here are a few ideas for thinking that through:
Not wanting to answer
This is the hardest of all and requires a judgement call: work out why they don't want to answer and act accordingly. It could be that they are afraid of getting the answer wrong, that they are concerned about the political risks of answering correctly, or that they have something to hide. Either way, it is important to understand why they are not wanting to answer before responding. If they are afraid of getting it wrong, encouragement would work better, however if they have something to hide no amount of encouragement will help.
Not knowing how to answer
In this area it is hard for me to avoid offering some of our tools to help. Here are some free options:
- Offer a template to enable them to focus on one main idea and then break their answer into logical parts. You can get one here that might help http://bit.ly/storylinetemplates
- Suggest they download the free chapter of our book, The So What Strategy here: http://sowhatstrategy.com
- Invite them to try a free module of our online Clarity Concepts course, available at https://claritycollege.co
Not knowing the answer
This one is the easiest of all to fix: Give them advance warning by providing important questions before the meeting. When doing so, add extra contextual information in your request so you can be confident that they understand the context of the request and can tailor their response accordingly.
For example, general requests such as “update me on the state of the widget market” are not as useful as “please explain your view on the future of the widget market in light of new XYZ technologies that will come on stream over the coming two years”.
I hope this helps – if you would like more on this topic, download the full set of FAQs from the webinar here.
Keywords: leadership
PRESENTED BY DAVINA STANLEY
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves 'nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience including
- learning structured thinking techniques at McKinsey in Hong Kong in the mid 1990s before coaching and training their teams globally as a freelancer for a further 15 years
- being approved to teach the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto in 2009
- helping CEOs, C-suite leaders and their reports deeply understand their stakeholder needs and communicate accordingly
- seeing leaders cut the number of times they review major papers by ~30% and teams cut the amount of time they take to prepare major papers by ~20%*
- watching senior meetings focus on substantive discussions and better decisions rather than trying to clarify the issue
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
Learn more at www.clarityfirstprogram.com
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results.
