Great Answers to Tough Questions at Work

Michael Dodd

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780857086396
• eBook ISBN: 9780857086402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CMI MANAGEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

The essential guide to turning tough questions into positive opportunities

Difficult questions can be thrown at you from your first job interview through to challenges you get when you've made it to the top. If you find yourself on the firing line on a regular or occasional basis this is the perfect go-to guide to help you turn tough questions into positive opportunities.

Great Answers to Tough Questions at Work promotes a confident 'win-win-win' mindset for questioner, answerer and wider audiences beyond. Author Michael Dodd provides golden formulae and proven strategies for constructing inspirational answers—however challenging, vicious, tricky or stupid the question. He outlines simple but successful techniques for dealing with the kind of nightmare questions which all ambitious people in the workplace have to face along their journey, whatever stage of their career.

• Contains critical communication skills for executives, managers, leaders and those aspiring to fill these roles
• Covers a wide range of work place scenarios such as job interviews, performance reviews, negotiations, customer relations, parliamentary inquiries and cross-examination
• Discusses how to see the issues underlying tough questions that you face in a different, more positive, solution-oriented way
• Includes case study examinations of key moments where people in the public spotlight have done something particularly well or particularly badly while answering questions and draws out the lessons for readers.

Part One
The Tools You Need

Here you'll find the tools you need in general terms in order to formulate and deliver great answers to those tough questions that can be fired at you at various times during your working life.

Part One introduces you to the play-to-win approach, which underpins the thinking throughout this book. Play-to-win here means, wherever possible, winning for you AND for the person asking you the tough questions – as well as for any additional audience in or outside the room.

This approach enables you to achieve a win/win or a win/win/win outcome, where you give answers that help you achieve your aims. At the same time, you'll provide your conversation partners and wider audience with the most useful, reassuring and inspiring things they need to know.

This part will equip you with, among other things, the two golden formulae for giving great answers to tough questions. These and other revelations can transform the way you view and take part in professional conversations now and in the future.

This is what routinely happens to participants who learn about the golden formulae in my communications-boosting master classes. When you understand the formulae, you tend to view verbal interactions involving you and those around you – and exchanges between others – in a different way.

You can see how those who are practiced in using the formulae – and those who have an instinct to act in line with them – come out better than others do time after time when they are verbally under scrutiny or under fire.

Knowing the formulae will help you become a better analyser of the conversational ecosystem around you. Putting the formulae into action in the workplace will propel you towards being a more successful player within it.

By the end of Part One you'll be set for what follows, where you'll be able to put these tools into action in a wide range of specific workplace situations both tomorrow and throughout your career.

So let's kick off now – and enjoy the first half of this two-part game that will empower you to operate more effectively, more wisely and more profitably in the vital world of workplace conversations by helping you and others achieve the outcomes you desire.

Chapter 1
Winning Answers Every Time

Imagine you suddenly find yourself in charge of a bunch of four-year-olds about to play their first game of football.

The youngsters are revved up, have short attention spans and are under pressure to perform from their pushy parents. Amidst the excitement they could easily lose sight of what they're really meant to do.

Reduced to its simplest, your initial pre-match job as manager is to get across one clear over-riding message to the team members: “If you're going to win the game you have to score at least one goal – and more if you can.”

Sure they'll need to keep the ball out of their own goalmouth. But even if they defend perfectly, they won't actually win the game unless they get the ball into their opponent's net at least once, and ideally more.

This may seem obvious. But in a broadly similar situation, when it comes to answering tough questions in the workplace, many people don't score any goals – and don't even try to.

Their approach is to go into that job interview, phone call with a hesitant prospect or potentially angry shareholder meeting and just hope that somehow they will scrape through to get an acceptable outcome without totally shredding their reputation.

Scoring a Goal with Every Answer

A typical comment they make beforehand is: “I hope they ask me the right questions.”

Or, more negatively, their plea is: “I hope they don't ask me THAT.”

Alas, when it comes to situations such as these, the interview panel members, your prospect or the shareholders will often see it as their job to ask you the WRONG questions. They will often fire questions that are designed to score a goal against you. If you just defend without actually kicking any goals you will come out a loser, as will the four-year-old footballers.

Worse still, if you don't seek to kick goals then you're letting down the very people you ought to be convincing about your case – as well as yourself.

To come out as a winner you need to have the right winning mindset before the challenging conversation starts. This will help guide you towards the winning outcomes for you and others in the conversation.

Fundamental to this winning mindset is to realize that when you're being asked tough questions, there are always positive and helpful things you can say that will benefit the others involved.

However dire a situation is – even, tragically, if it involves injuries or deaths that could be seen as your organization's fault – in a tough professional conversation there are still goals you can and need to score and objectives you can achieve for the benefit of all those touched by what's happened.

And surprisingly to some, part of the art of scoring those goals includes actually answering those tough questions.

At the very least, your responses should involve explaining why you can't answer a particular question and then adding something extra that's useful and to the point. It always requires telling exact truths and nothing other than the truth. But it necessitates telling these exact truths in the best possible way. And it involves getting across a message – effectively scoring that goal – at every opportunity.

This means you should be seeking to score a goal every time a question comes to you.

I've found there are proven strategies involving highly effective techniques for giving great answers to all tough workplace questions. You will learn these secrets as the book progresses, but first we need to ensure the right mental approach – a win/win outlook – or when there is an audience beyond your questioner, a win/win/win outlook.

Let's go back to the football. Just suppose you did so well in getting the right message across to those four-year-olds that they won their first game as a result – and many more besides.

Eventually you come to be regarded as a football managing genius. You go on to manage older teams in bigger leagues. Ultimately you get put in charge of trying to win the next football World Cup – for the country of your choice.

Given the significance of the mission, there's one thing you certainly would not do. You wouldn't just turn up on the pitch with your players on the day of the first World Cup match and merely hope for the best.

You would pick your squad with great care and plan, prepare and practice for victory.

This may sound like a no-brainer. But when going into situations where they're facing tough questions, it's amazing how many otherwise intelligent people just “wing it”.

Fascinatingly, this is not what most of the same people would do with their household spending, and not what business leaders would do with their company finances.

What you should do is implement the “3 Ps” of the verbal communications world – Plan, Prepare and Practice.

Instead, what too many people rely on is what pops into their head at the moment a tough – and often predictable – question is asked.

When explaining their lack of preparation, they sometimes reveal that they believe it's all about “thinking fast on your feet”.

Now while being able to think quickly under pressure is a useful trait, in vital situations involving potentially career-killing questions you don't want to leave things to the whim of the moment. It's pretty hard for the most skilled of us to do this well with absolute consistency.

But it is possible for everyone in the workplace to consider in advance the questions they might face – and plan, prepare and practice in order to achieve the best possible result.

This plan, prepare and practice approach is effective for questions in everyday situations, which determine whether you end up having a good or a bad day at work. And it's effective in high-level cases at big moments that shape your long-term career prospects and potentially the outlook for your whole organization.

Taking Inspiration from a Master

Let's look at an instructive situation involving the head of Virgin, Sir Richard Branson.

In 2007 he suddenly faced questions over a fatal crash involving one of his company's trains in the Lake District of northern England.

The tragedy caused the death of an elderly woman, while the driver and dozens of passengers were injured. This is an awful situation for anyone to be interviewed about – all the more so when the reporters are asking you questions at the scene with the mangled wreckage of your company's colourfully branded train in the background.

Nonetheless, Sir Richard wisely cut short a family holiday in Italy to return to Britain to be questioned by the media swarm that had gathered at the scene of the crash.

He rightly declared it a very sad day – but he also made a series of positive points as well, all of which were hugely advantageous to Virgin, but also helpful to others.

Sir Richard hailed the company driver as “a hero” for the way he handled the situation when the train got into trouble.

He proclaimed the Virgin train to be “magnificent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction: Helping You Thrive On “Blowtorch-On-The-Belly” Questioning
• Part One: The Tools You Need
• Part Two: Using Your New Tools
• Ongoing Enhancement: Great Answers for Your Inspirational Future
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• End User License Agreement