Handling Hostile Questions and Statements in Six Simple Steps
Learn how to manage the harshest feedback from colleagues, customers, interviewers and audiences
Handling hostile questions and statements is a communication and presentation skill like any other. Despite the added anxiety that harshly phrased feedback can cause, a few simple techniques will help you defuse the hostility and deter further attacks.
When faced with a verbal attack, our instinct is to counterattack or become defensive. This will come across in your words and body language, and risks provoking the person or weakening your reputation with others. That’s why the first step to handling hostile questions and statements is to stop yourself from responding immediately. Instead, calmly follow the steps in this article.
As you work through them, remember that hostility is rarely the way to solve conflict in the workplace. By taking the high ground, you prove yourself to be a good listener who genuinely wants to extract potentially valuable input from someone’s question or statement, regardless of its phrasing. After all, there can be huge business value in asking difficult questions and challenging people’s perceptions.
If you remain professional in the face of someone who is clearly trying to provoke you, it puts you in a much stronger position all round. It’s also much harder for people to argue with someone who is perpetually positive and polite.
1. “Can You Repeat the Question?”
Simply asking the person to repeat their question or statement can defuse some of the hostility straight away. By inferring you haven’t quite understood, you encourage them to explain their point in a clearer way, which often means removing some of the hostile wording. This can be particularly useful if you sense that the person crafted their initial question or statement for maximum emotional impact.
Asking the questioner to repeat the question also paints you as someone who values clear communication. In other words, you are concerned that the person’s hostility could cause a miscommunication that you want to address straight away so you can provide an accurate response.
2. Consider Their Motivation
When handling hostile questions and statements, listen very carefully to how the person phrases their sentence. This enables you to identify their intent.
In most cases, hostile people want further information, clarification or assurances. However, watch out for questions that are designed to:
- Make you look bad in front of others, or provoke you
- Make the questioner look superior to you
- Trick you into admitting something negative about yourself or your work
- Push the questioner’s agenda or position
Considering the person’s motivation will help you determine their core concern. It also helps you decide if the person has a valid need or simply wishes to cause upset.
3. Rephrase
The next step for handling hostile questions and statements is to rephrase them. This gives you a further opportunity to remove hostile wording. As long as you capture the person’s core concern in your rephrasing, it will be hard for them to reintroduce hostility.
The trick is to turn their question or statement into a more practical sentence that you can address in an equally practical way. For example, if the questioner abruptly asks,
“How do I know you’ll do what you promised this time?”
you could rephrase it as
“You want to know what guarantees are in place going forward?”
4. Find Alignment
Having rephrased the question or statement, you can begin your response. Ideally, try to start from a position of alignment that puts you on the same side as the questioner to some degree. In other words, find something you can both agree on.
Remember that hostile questions tend to flow from negative feelings such as distress, frustration or anger. The person may feel they have been damaged in some way, or are likely to be in the future. In many cases, simply recognising these emotions gives you a strong point of alignment. It also demonstrates that you understand how the person feels and empathise with their situation. For example, “I know how upsetting this must be.”
Another technique for handling hostile questions and statements is to remind everyone of a shared goal you are all working towards. This encourages people to think objectively about the needs of the group rather than their own personal perspectives. For example, you could start by reminding them that, “Our ultimate aim is to launch a better service than our competitors.”
5. Talk in Terms of Impact
When handling hostile questions and statements, it is understandable to want to justify your position using facts. However, bear in mind that facts alone are unlikely to evoke enough emotion to counteract the person’s strong negative feelings. Your justification needs to evoke even stronger feelings, preferably positive.
The best approach is to translate facts into their impacts on people’s lives. That could be members of your team, customers of the organisation or the wider public. Again, this encourages the hostile person to think more objectively, which may be all it takes to alleviate their concerns. It also portrays you as someone who cares, rather than someone who is lost in the data.
Try to keep your response as brief as possible, and make sure it is factually accurate. Guesses and mistruths that temporarily calm a difficult situation will almost certainly backfire at some point. You can also use storytelling techniques to further enhance the emotional impact of your response.
6. “Next Question Please”
If you are delivering a presentation, be mindful that a single member of the audience cannot be allowed to dominate the entire Q&A session. The simplest technique is to follow up your handling of the hostile question or statement by immediately opening the floor to other people.
That may not be practical in every situation, particularly if the questioner is a line manager or senior stakeholder. Even then, it may be best to suggest you discuss their concern separately or come back to them with the information they need. This allows you to move on to the next question, which will hopefully be more pleasant to answer.
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