The smirk

In my Strategic Communication program, managers ask for tips. I refuse to give them. Tips are tactics, and the program is about strategy. But I make one exception: if pressed, I say as seriously as I can that the best way to be smart is to answer the question. No more, no less. I can see the smirk before it reaches their faces.

They think I’m stating the obvious, which is why the smirk is so telling.

Early in leadership workshops, I run an exercise. Participants practice asking questions, something they do constantly but have never been asked to examine, and notice the answers their questions trigger. I tell them explicitly: facilitators will answer yes/no questions with yes or no. We will answer open-ended questions openly.

Then we do exactly what we said we’d do.

And they get frustrated.

Some complain. “You’re not being helpful.” “You know what I’m trying to ask.” “Why are you making this so difficult?”

All we did was answer their questions. No more, no less.

They’re used to getting more than they asked for. They’re used to giving it, too.

Someone asks you a yes/no question, and you give three paragraphs. Someone asks about timeline, and you give timeline plus budget plus risk assessment plus your opinion on strategy. We’ve learned to expect, and provide, elaboration as proof of competence. Sometimes it’s self-protection as well: covering every base before the boss can ask the follow-up.

So restraint reads as withholding. When I answer “yes” to a yes/no question, it feels like I’m being difficult.

“You know what I’m trying to ask” is, in most conversations, a fair complaint. Reading intent is part of good listening. In the exercise I suspend it on purpose, so the asker can see how much of their question they were leaving me to do.

I can do that because I set the terms, and I announced them. In most meetings nobody announces the terms, and declining to infer what the most senior person meant reads as resistance.

There’s also surprise.

Nobody discusses what makes a question strong or weak. We treat questioning as natural. Being asked to do it deliberately feels strange, like suddenly having to think about how you walk.

Under that sits a bigger assumption: that we already understand each other, that precision is unnecessary or even pedantic. “We all know what we mean.”

Until we discover we don’t.

“Answer the question, no more, no less” binds the asker as much as the answerer. It’s shared work.

The asker has to get clear about what they’re actually asking. Not hide behind vague questions that let them avoid committing to what they want to know.

The answerer responds to what was asked. Answering what they assume was meant, wish had been asked, or expect next is answering someone else’s question.

Sometimes the answer itself needs more than a word, because the question rests on a false premise or a bare yes would mislead. The test is whose need the extra words serve.

We often prove we’re smart by thinking three steps ahead. Comprehensive responses feel like value-add. Like we’re being helpful.

But that performance obscures whether we understood the question. And it prevents the asker from doing their work: asking the next question based on the answer they got, not the answer plus everything adjacent we decided to include.

Partway through the workshop, after the frustration surfaces and we’ve talked through what it reveals, I ask:

If answering the question, no more, no less, sounds obvious but requires dismantling several layers of how we communicate, what else seems obvious that might require dismantling several layers?

The question only works because they’ve just felt the gap between knowing something and practicing it. Between hearing obvious advice and recognizing how much it asks them to unlearn.

What they discover in that gap is their own to find.

Without the smirk.

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