With the growing prevalence of virtual meetings over the last five years, I’ve had the debate many times on whether anonymous Q&A should be provided. I’ve had this debate at Avanti and with other companies and leadership teams. Providing an anonymous submission option can surface a lot of Q’s. Leadership teams are generally hesitant or explicitly uncomfortable with anonymous Q&A because they worry the anonymity will lead to people trying to throw “gotcha’s” in, or even blatantly trolling the presenter or company. And those concerns are warranted. We’ve been offering anonymous Q&A during virtual townhalls and company wide meetings for years and we’ve had some pretty gnarly and aggressive loaded questions come through. Not always and not consistently but on multiple occasions.
Despite that, I am adamant in my belief that it’s always worth providing the option for anonymous Q&A. My rationale is if someone is willing to submit a trolling question in the Q&A, they are almost certainly willing to say that same comment behind closed doors to their peers and colleagues. I’d prefer the opportunity to address a harsh comment publicly and provide my own position on the topic, even if it’s uncomfortable, then allow it to circulate privately.
Over time, I’ve come to believe there are two approaches to take when someone puts a loaded question in that has the obvious intent of being hurtful or insinuating something negative. Either you ignore the clearly cynical intent and address the comment head on without becoming disturbed by it OR you must be aggressive in defending whatever topic, objective, or team is clearly being attacked. Anything in between comes off poorly. I’ve only taken the “defend aggressively” approach once and consider it a tool for a particularly offensive question.
To use an example, let’s say someone makes a comment clearly intended to discredit a specific team and the work they are doing. Perhaps one team has an important goal, is working exceptionally hard, but hasn’t made as much public progress as you would like. And someone says something like “is it even realistic to believe team A achieves their goal by the end of this quarter?” You know the whole company knows the answer to the question so it’s probably not coming from a place of curiosity but a desire to highlight the team’s miss. I would accept the concern and speak to the situation transparently, acknowledge the shortfall, discuss why you believe it occurred, and what steps you believe can fix it (e.g., “No. I don’t think the team will accomplish their goal by the end of the quarter. With the benefit of hindsight, we set the wrong goal. Here’s why. Here’s what we’re doing about it”).