Ask Out Loud

How being direct can save you time, energy, and headaches

Photo by steffen wienberg on Unsplash

My friend was once working on a really large product launch and rebranding. He and his team had been preparing for months for this big day. Finally, it arrived, and they sent out an email to the world sharing this massive new product that would be instrumental to the company going forward. He received an email response directly from the CEO saying there was something wrong with the landing page for the project. 

Immediately, my friend and his team sprang into action. They looked at the page and decided it needed reworking. They spent a couple months redoing the whole thing from start to finish. Proud of their work, then shared it with the CEO, telling him they had taken his feedback and redesigned the page. 

The CEO replied, "I think the button is still off-center." 

My friend replied, "Son of a gun, he's right!" 

Overthinking things 

My friend told me this story several years ago, and I've shared it from time to time since, because it's a reminder that often we read way too much into someone else's words. This is particularly true when the other person is much more senior than we are. 

This has happened to me many times in my career: someone, usually a superior, would make a comment or give me feedback that left me overthinking what they said, afraid to ask what they meant. I would torture myself over their words, going over them again and again in my struggle to interpret what the CEO or executive had wanted—when the whole time I could have just asked them out loud. Yes, it was really that simple, even if it seemed daunting.

Then the shoe ended up on the other foot. When I first got to Ancestry, I was in an early operational review when I asked what I thought was an innocuous question about registrants. I assumed I would get a five-minute answer. I didn't hear back for a couple weeks, when someone asked to set up a time to share with me the two-week analysis they had done to answer my question. 

I learned my lesson that day: that I had to be careful to clarify what I was asking for whenever I made a request. I also began asking teams to clarify with me whether my questions would require a five-minute answer or a two-week answer.

Sometimes, what we think is an easy ask is actually a huge lift for someone else. Similarly, when someone else asks us for a favor, it at times ends up being much more than they thought it would be—and sometimes we would rather do the work than ask the question directly. This can cost us needless time, effort, and stress when they might actually just be asking for some clarification or information we have on hand. 

How many times have we allowed this miscommunication waste cycle to suck up time we could be using on more productive things?

Learning to ask

The first and most important thing you can do if you want to avoid falling into this trap is to be unafraid to ask for clarification. Most people would appreciate being given the opportunity to amend or restate their request if they knew they were being misconstrued.

That said, asking for a more direct response isn't always easy. If you struggle to get clarification, use this simple structure to iron out the details: 

The context: When and where was the request made?

Example: “During our meeting yesterday, you asked about the value of registrants.”