Questions As Incoming Missiles   The new President, a super star with a brilliant resume, started attending our Division’s weekly meetings. We were between divisions heads, because he had just fired the old one, so he took it upon himself to see what was going on. We were all pretty excited to be in the presence of corporate royalty. The first meeting, though in a room a bit small for all the people crowded in, seemed to be going okay as people reported the results. But then things went a bit crazy. When he didn’t like what he heard, he would explode with rage, going from zero to 100 in a nanosecond. His fury was so intense and his questions were brutal and lethal. If you were on the receiving end, your spine simply decalcified on the spot. Every week the meeting was like this.   Here is something I noticed. Never sit in front of an enraged President. Whoever sits in front is going to get both barrels between the eyes. It happened every week, time after time. Get there early and always sit at the absolute end of the long table, on the same side as the President. It is very hard to see you there, so you can escape his wrath and get a good view of the decimation taking place amongst your colleagues!   In business, we are sometimes confronted by a doozy of a question. It could be from the Board Chairperson, an unhappy client, a town hall meeting for the staff, the union delegation, cranky shareholders, an overly ambitious peer during a presentation to the big bosses or a member of the audience attending one of our speeches. Usually we don’t handle it very well, because we rush to defang the question by answering it immediately. We speak, drawing on the first thing that pops into our mind, rather than going to our third or fourth more considered response.   When questions are thinly disguised incoming missiles, everyone around us takes cover, in case any of the debris lands on them. A lot of gazing at shoes starts to happen and we feel we are out there on our own. Counter-intuitively, when we handle one of these very hot ones, everyone is really impressed and our stocks rise substantially. So knowing how to deal with danger can be a rather large positive. Great, so how do we deal with trouble?   This requires discipline, concentration and courage. Do not allow your face to show the shock of the assault. Put up the best poker face you can manage as you listen to the tirade. That also applies to your body. I was under attack in a public situation and I caught myself moving my head slowly from side to side, as a sign of my negativity to what was being proffered. I wasn’t even aware at the start that I was even doing that, so we have to be careful to rein ourselves in physically.   Also never nod up and down as you listen to the question under any circumstances. It is a habit we have created to acknowledge that we are listening to you, but it can get us into trouble. If it is being filmed, the clever editor will run your apparent agreement with either the negative comment of one of the participants or from the host of the show. It looks like you are agreeing with them.   Repeat the question, but do it in a way that kills the power of the weapon. In a public occasion, people often cannot hear the question, so it is legitimate to repeat it for the audience. When we repeat it though, we emasculate it. For example, imagine it is a town hall meeting and the question rockets in that, “Isn’t it true that 15% of the staff are going to be fired in this financial year?”. We don’t repeat , “The question was are we going to fire 15% of the staff before year end?”. Instead we neutralise the fire of the words and say, “The question was about staffing levels”.   Just by going through this process alone, we are buying ourselves valuable thinking time. We can add extra thinking time when we include a cushion statement. This cushion is nice, fluffy and soft and is placed between the hard, sharp edges of the question and our answer. In the example above