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“This is such fun. I can’t wait for the next hostile question!”
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Imagine you’ve been asked to present at a business meeting.
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The subject is an ongoing project you’ve been working on for nearly a year. Your presentation is a progress report on the project.
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There’ve been a number of delays with this project – some caused by your team and others beyond your control.
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The point is that management is getting frustrated by the time it’s taking to complete the project.
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A lot of money has been spent, the launch has been delayed and investors and shareholders are beginning to question your company’s competence.
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You are very likely going to face a hostile audience during this meeting who are inevitably going to ask you some uncomfortable questions.
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They’re not going to necessarily be friendly.
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You need to be prepared for the barrage of hostile questions.
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The key is to be diplomatic but firm. You can disagree strongly, but try to avoid saying ‘No’.
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Listen to the lesson
Listen to the lesson
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How do you avoid saying ‘No’, I hear you ask?
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To start, you can keep your answers short and simple. If necessary, you can be vague.
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Then, you can use certain expressions that will help you say ‘No’ in a softer way. Expressions like ‘hopefully not’, ‘not quite’, ‘not at all’ and so on.
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In this lesson, I am going to show you how to use 12 of these expressions.
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I have divided them in 3 exchanges and highlighted them. I got this idea from Mark Powell’s book “Presenting in English”.
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Exchange 1
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Have you reached an agreement with the Czech authorities yet?
Not yet. There are still one or two things we need to discuss.
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But you’ve had three months to discuss them.
True. Three months seems a long time but that is the standard waiting time with the Czech authorities.
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Mm, hasn’t the fact that we know important people in the Czech government helped at all?
To some extent, but we still need to go through the bureaucracy. We hope to get a final agreement in November.
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November! That’s going to create all sorts of problems with the launch.
Hopefully not. We’ve managed to reschedule a number of things and it might just work.
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Exchange 2
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So we lost all our records when the network went down, did we?
Not quite. Just the last two months.
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I see. I suppose it’s too late to recover any of the data?
Not necessarily. There may just be a way of retrieving some of the files.
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What I don’t understand is why the Logistics Department did not back up the system?
Yes, I know. It is standard procedure.
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Does this happen a lot?
Not as a rule. It was just one of those unfortunate things.
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Exchange 3
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You have to admit that this has been a marketing disaster.
Not at all. The team has done an excellent job. It was a tough project.
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But wouldn’t it have been better if you’d outsourced the creative work?
Not really. For one thing, it would have cost significantly more.
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But it was you who said we should spend more on promotions.
Granted. But we don’t have the budget to outsource the work.
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So you’re happy with the way things went?
Not entirely, but I don’t think it was a complete disaster either.
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Over to you
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Using the above expressions, create similar exchanges using a recent difficult situation you had.
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Then, practise the exchange with someone.
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If you don’t have someone to share the exchange with, share it with me in the comments box and I’ll give you feedback.
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By the way, have you explored the emergency toolbox I’ve created just for you?
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Click on the image to find out more.
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Next week,
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Guest blogger, Steven Wesley, will show you how by improving your business writing you can master spoken English.
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If you don’t want to miss that lesson, make sure you join the EWAT community today and next week’s lesson will be delivered automatically to your inbox.
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Ciao for now
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Shanthi
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Source: Presenting in English by Mark Powell
