The Clean Answer

There are many things that I love about my work; one of which is the opportunity to observe my clients ‘in action’, in order to provide rich and extensive feedback on their strengths, as well as those areas for growth. One such occasion really struck me of late and – with my client’s permission because he reads my newsletter – he has allowed me to share. Recently, I had the opportunity to observe a senior sales leader conduct a sales meeting. He had all his functional and regional leaders in the room and,during the course of the three-hour meeting, he was asked a question by one of his team members … so far nothing at all unusual with this situation. However, his answer was fascinating … because it last for five minutes. Yes -five minutes straight. At times the content was witty, amusing, insightful; , for the vast majority of the time the content was mired in detail, irrelevant and frustrating to hear.

This got me thinking…what’s really going on here? The question posed was very clear and simple; the answer given most certainly was not.

We live in an attention deficit business environment where most people aren’t listening most of the time and when I debriefed with the client, he was gracious enough to acknowledge a number of things:

1. He didn’t really hear the question properly 
2. He believed that he needed to prove he knew a lot of things to his colleagues 
3. He enjoyed ’taking the floor’ to share his point of view 

Now, before any of us leaps to judgement, as human beings we all seek different forms of validation from our communication with others. Whilst our motivations might be similar or different to those of my client, the reality is that what we believe impacts how we communicate, and, at times, this can work against us. In this instance, it was preventing my client from being crisp, concise and compelling with his communication. As a result, we have been working on what I term ‘the clean answer’. In other words, think of what you hear when you listen to a politician being interviewed by the media – and recognise that I am talking about the complete opposite of that. Whilst I appreciate that this is a generalisation, all too often I hear long, irrelevant, pre-scripted answers that are not connected to the question posed, and when politicians do this, they actually create more difficulty for themselves by providing more material for the reporter to scrutinise.

The ‘clean answer’ technique is all about answering the question asked, resisting the temptation to provide all the backstory, avoiding the trap of being defensive in offering rationales for things that were never sought in the question, stepping away from all the detail and, knowing when to quickly stop talking. This is an incredibly powerful communication technique and one that works well face to face, is extremely effectively in the remote meeting environment and absolutely essential when pitching to senior leaders.

Say less, but mean more. Answer the question and nothing else. Be brief, be brilliant and be done.