Fielding Questions
Once you have made the presentation, there will be time set aside for the committee members or trustees to ask you questions. Typically, any question is fair game, so you need to have done plenty of homework prior to the session. The importance of preserving this question-and-answer (Q&A) period cannot be overstated. Officers and trustees have one job to do in such meetings, and that is to decide whether to fund or decline recommendations. In order to make this decision, they need to have all of their questions answered, and the Q&A period is their only opportunity to get those answers. As mentioned previously, it is wise for you to ensure that they get these opportunities—in fact, that discussion time is maximized.
Once the Q&A session begins, it is important for you to welcome the opportunity it presents and to project that feeling to committee or board members. Acting as if you are facing the Spanish Inquisition will immediately create the wrong atmosphere and will probably invite harsher questioning. The Q&A truly is an opportunity for you, for it allows unfiltered communication with the foundation's decision makers. It is a wonderful chance to educate, to experiment, and to test approaches for the future. If you both feel and project this attitude, chances are the Q&A session will be a pleasing and productive experience for all involved.
Just as for oral presentations, there are home runs and third rails for Q&A sessions.
Q&A Home Runs
1. Treating every question as a good one. Whether it is obvious or subtle, simple or complex, off target or dead on, every question should be treated with respect and answered with care. Starting off the answer with a construction like “I am glad you asked that” lets everyone know that you relish open give-and-take and want to answer the question.
2. Presenting positive body language and facial expressions. A thoughtful look or a smile telegraphs an engaged, positive program officer. Any other expressions send the wrong messages. Your standing erect, making eye contact, and being relaxed tell committee and board members that you have confidence in the proposal you are presenting. Again, the nonverbal cues can be more powerful than the verbal messages.
3. When necessary, disagreeing with committee and board members in a tactful but honest way. Inevitably, a member will take issue with something found in the funding document or the oral presentation. In responding to this, it is essential that you avoid appearing combative. Obviously, if the member is correct, it is wise to openly and graciously acknowledge that fact. If the dispute is over an interpretation or a matter of opinion, it is usually best for you simply to yield the point. Winning a public argument with an officer or a trustee over a trivial matter is for you the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory. If, however, the dispute is over a matter of fact and the member is clearly mistaken, then you cannot leave the error uncorrected. You should, however, find a tactful way to handle the correction. For example, you might say, “I am glad you raised that point. It is true that the consensus of opinion for many years has been in agreement with the position that you just mentioned, but the most recent research by X and Y indicates that just the opposite is the case.” This tack avoids such hot-button words as wrong, incorrect, and error, and lets everyone know that you are both respectful of others and conversant with the latest research.
Q&A Third Rails
1. Appearing defensive. No matter how pointed the questions, you must field them with openness and good humor. A single roll of eyes ceilingward suggests contempt for the questioner and can sink even the most lucid presentation. A tone of anger in your voice will cancel out any number of well-made verbal points. You should always drive defensively, but you should never behave that way during a Q&A session.
2. Making up an answer when you are stumped by a question. The temptation to do so is enormous. No one, especially one who is supposed to be an expert on a topic, ever wants to admit ignorance. Because officers and trustees make up the audience, doing so seems tantamount to admitting to the boss that you have not done the necessary homework. And because the audience members are not experts on the subject, chances are that they would believe a plausible fib. Tempted though you may be, you must resist the urge to be “creative” in this fashion. Should you actually be caught in such a fabrication (which will happen sooner or later if you make up enough responses), you will have placed yourself in the unenviable situation of admitting to being either a dissembler or a sloppy researcher. Whether losing one's credibility or losing one's reputation for intellectual rigor is worse can be debated, but what cannot be gainsaid is that neither does you any good. When you are asked a question to which you don't know the answer, it is well to remember Mark Twain's celebrated advice: “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.” A response might be, “That is a very good question. I am embarrassed to say that I do not know the answer to it. However, I will find the answer as soon as I can and get right back to you.” You need to do this follow-up and do it as soon as possible. It is a far, far better thing to own up to ignorance on a particular point than to give people grounds to question your integrity and character.
3. Disrespecting the questions. This is, by extension, disrespecting the questioner, and it is a very bad move indeed. To indicate, whether verbally or nonverbally, that the question is elementary or that its answer is obvious is to telegraph disrespect. The inappropriate use of humor is equally deadly; seeming to make fun of the question or questioner offers a certain path to alienating people who will shortly be voting on the funding request. You must approach each and every question with courtesy and dignity, as though the passage of the request depends on your response—which it very well might.