Answering Questions
Providing useful and relevant information to a questioner.
The answers you give to people's questions have the capacity to help or hinder their development. Questions are asked in order to solicit answers from which people can learn (except in the House of Commons where questions and answers are reduced to point-scoring ploys).
Answering questions in a way that aids learning and development has three different aspects:
- Exposing yourself to questioning
- The quality of your answers
- The extent to which your answers are understood by the questioner
You have to take responsibility for all three aspects, not just the second one.
If you don't behave in ways that actively invite questions, then people may hold back and not ask the questions they would like to, for fear of appearing foolish. Try having regular question and answer sessions where people can come prepared with questions. Even the act of inviting questions, as opposed to assuming people will be brave enough to ask them if they want to, sends out a signal that asking questions is ok.
There are a number of inter-related criteria to determine the quality of your answers:
- how much new information the answer contains for the questioner
- the extent to which the answer is relevant to the questioner
- the extent to which the answer is useful to the questioner.
The higher your answers can score on all three counts, the better their quality from a developmental point of view.
The final aspect, that is all too easily overlooked, is to check that your answer has been understood. The onus is always on you, the communicator, to do this. People will often pretend they are clear when in fact they are not. The surest way to test understanding is to ask the questioner to summarise what they have just understood from your answer. If people know you are prone to doing this, it is an additional incentive for them to listen hard to your answers.