Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of executive

coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want

to be perceived. I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today we're talking

about answering essay questions. Several months ago in the podcast called sorting and labeling you heard about Joseph

who was struggling to give clear concise summaries of complex information.

The sorting and labeling tool helped him.

At the beginning of a recent coaching session, I asked Joseph, how's it going with the executives

during your weekly update?

Seven minutes into his rambling answer, I finally held up my hand in surrender. He looked

startled. He'd been deep in his own thoughts. And then he looked a little

sheepish and said, oh, I did it again, didn't I? Indeed he had. He had taken my open-ended essay question,

how's it going with the executives, as an invitation to spill out all his thoughts in whatever random order they occurred to him.

It's not an effective style.

So we began discussing how to answer essay questions crisply.

Over a year ago, I posted a podcast called Answer What's Asked. It laid out four rules for answering

closed-ended questions. In that podcast, I said that a closed-ended question is like a very specific slot in a warehouse,

only certain things fit in it.

Well, the problem with open-ended questions is that they feel like they're the opposite of that.

They feel like big invitations to talk at length.

Here listen to these three examples of open-ended questions.

How did you end up with those numbers? What are the pitfalls if we take this

action? What can we do differently next time? Don't those sound like invitations to just

...