How to ask questions the RIGHT way

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Now, onto today’s topic.

Read time: 4 minutes

There’s an art to everything — even when asking questions.

In fact, there’s DOZENS of insights around the ‘best practices’ of asking questions. Today, we’ll cover one that you can immediately use in your networking chats, interviews, and work.

The concept is called ‘Proactive Asks’.

In a nutshell, it’s when you incorporate your assumed answer into a question to show you’re ‘pushing the thinking’ as much as possible, instead of just relying on others to feed you the whole answer.

The concept applies across a wide range of scenarios.

Example 1: Let’s say you’re interviewing for a YouTube Business Strategy role, and the interviewer throws you a market sizing question — “estimate the number of new YouTube Premium subscribers per year.”

You know a bit about YouTube Premium, but you’re not totally sure.

❌ What is YouTube Premium?

✅ ”I personally haven’t used YouTube Premium, but from my understanding it’s a paid version that offers services beyond the free version such as better UX, no ads, and a ‘YouYouTube Music’ bundle. Is this correct?”

**side note: ‘market sizing’ is a core skill for many business roles, and are likely to come up during MNC interviews. If you’re not familiar with this concept…..reply to me on this thread. We’ll cover this in depth if enough people have questions.

Example 2: You encounter an obstacle at work, and go to your manager for guidance.

❌ How do we solve problem X?

✅ ”Hey boss — problem X showed up. I already thought about it, and based on the data I think there’s 3 options to tackle this — A, B, and C. Personally, I think option A works best because of XX reasons. What do you think? Am I on the right track?”

Example 3: You show up at a networking conversation with someone whose name you’re not sure how to pronounce.

😶 Can you tell me how to pronounce your name?

Fine, I get it. Most people will go with the above. It’s a neutral approach.

But the most proactive individuals (read: best networkers) will try their best to find out for themselves first — Google how to pronounce the name, or even ask friends familiar with the language / friends who know the individual.

They’ll then arrive at the networking chat with a ~80% confidence, and do a proactive ask — “is XX the right way to pronounce your name? Let me know if I’m off!”

Worst case scenario, the individual just tells you how to pronounce their name correctly. No biggie. The same thing would have happened if you just went with the ‘lazier’ approach of asking ‘how do you pronounce your name?’.

But there’s an upside here — if you get it right, the individual is delighted and you start off on a very positive foot.

💡 The key takeaway — you stand out by consistently doing more than what others, in a similar situation, would have done……..even when it comes to asking questions.

Something to think about.

➡️ If this or any of the previous insights resonated with you, I’d highly appreciate you sharing the signup link with 2-3 colleagues/friends — they’ll thank YOU for sharing, and you’ll win some brownie points with them #networking 😊.

Until next time,

Vincent (LinkedIn)