62. Speed Kills in Q&A: The Vanishing Art of Listening

One of the most important qualities for success in business is the very quality that impedes the effective handling of tough questions: rapid response time. Every businessperson is expected to react quickly to problems and to come up with prompt solutions. But in responding to tough questions, speed can kill.

Tough questions are a part of the territory in business and, after the Great Recession, the terrain is rougher than ever. In every facet of life, people are in search of answers to their problems, so their questions are loaded with emotion. If a responder answers too rapidly and with equal emotion, be it defensive or contentious, the battle is joined and the exchange heads rapidly downhill—a lose-lose engagement.

In preparing for tough questions, a results-driven mindset often involves an approach know as “Rude Q&A,” in which a list of anticipated challenging questions is assembled and then matched with a list of appropriate answers. This approach has a small flaw: People don’t ask questions as written; most questions come out in long, rambling, and convoluted sentences. This causes the responder to scramble for the right answer, at best, or the wrong answer, at worst.

The solution is to slam on the brakes and not think of the answer. Stay in the moment. As the question is being asked, listen carefully and identify the central issue embedded within the convolution.

What a concept: Listen! Listening is becoming a lost practice in our culture. For those people who still retain a semblance of politeness, listening has become a matter of waiting for one’s turn to speak. And for those sadly increasing numbers of people who no longer bother to listen, the practice has converted to talking past the next person.

For the results-driven businessperson, listening will feel counterintuitive and will be difficult to do, but it is absolutely vital. Failure to observe this simple rule can result in failure of the answer, the presentation, the meeting, or the entire business proposition.

When you are asked a question, follow the advice of the old adage frequently attributed to Epictetus, a first-century Roman philosopher, “We have two ears and one mouth, and we should use them in that proportion.”

The full solution is called Active Listening, a subject that brings up more than eight million entries in an Internet search, but the essence of the skill can be summed up in one sentence: When you are being asked a question, use the powers of your mind to focus on the essence of the question, not on the answer.

Listen.