How to Give Feedback That Works

From Cheryl Lambert, President of JDC, with a specialty in Executive Development

In 30 years of managing, I’ve developed a powerful tool for providing feedback to employees that is impossible to ignore.  The process has an acronym that sounds like a missile, and that’s an apt metaphor for how it helps target behavior that can be improved. It’s called SBI: an acronym for Situation, Behavior, Impression.

SBI is simple in theory, but like any skill, requires practice to employ effectively. It works because the first two observations are based on fact. This makes the subject more open to hearing the impression he might be creating.

Here’s an example of an SBI that I used recently:

• “At this week’s staff meeting…” (Situation)
• “I noticed you were looking at your laptop for most of the hour…” (Behavior)
• “This might give your colleagues the impression that you’re not interested in what they have to report.” (Impression).

The beauty of using an SBI is that it’s based on fact (not emotion or conjecture), which is difficult to argue with. While the impression might be disputable, it’s powerful enough to get someone to explore his/her behavior and change it.

Here’s another of my favorites:

• “At our weekly debriefing…” (Situation)
• “I notice you sit with your arms crossed…” (Behavior)
• “This might signal to the team that you are not open to their suggestions on how to improve our project.” (Impression).

In this instance, the executive was floored, and adamantly insisted that he always sits like this because he’s most comfortable having his arms crossed on his chest.

This, he insisted, was his natural posture when sitting. I told him that I understood this may indeed be a comfortable stance, but it might unintentionally signal that he’s closed-minded.

This really bothered him, so we talked more and I asked him to notice if he sat in this position during dinner with his three kids that evening.

The next morning he informed me that he did not cross his arms at the dinner table, and he doesn’t quite know why.

He agreed to try, as an experiment, to change his seated posture at our office meetings.

SBIs are so painless to use and yield such powerful results that I’ve even used them at home with my own recalcitrant teenagers to great success. I can’t recommend them enough.

And SBIs should also be used when providing positive feedback.