SBI Feedback
SBI Feedback (Situation-Behavior-Impact)
What is SBI feedback?
- Giving feedback in three parts: Situation, Behavior, Impact
- Observed facts, not personality judgments
- Works even better for praise
The first thing SBI changes is not the way people talk but how they prepare. Because you must specify the situation and behavior, instead of choosing words right before a review, the leader first digs into “what have I actually seen this person do?” This exposes the fact that if you have nothing to write down, you have no standing to give feedback. Ultimately, before it is a conversation technique, SBI is a device that forces everyday observation and note-taking.
In practice, the hard parts are B and I. You tell behavior from interpretation by asking “would a camera capture it?” “Didn't answer three questions” would be captured; “lacked motivation” would not. Impact falls into three levels: impact on me, on the team and colleagues, and on customers and results. First-person impact, which is nearly impossible to rebut, is the safest. As a rule, deliver it within three days of the incident, one issue at a time, in under two minutes. Use SBI-I, which asks about intent after the Impact, when a misunderstanding is likely. If Radical Candor decides whether to speak up, SBI shapes what you say once you've decided to.
The most common misconception is that SBI is a cushion that keeps the other person from feeling bad. Follow the structure, but if you tack on “so please change” at the end, the result is the same. Failures usually take one of three forms: putting a guess like “everyone was disappointed” in the Impact slot and collapsing when asked for evidence; stringing five or six stored-up incidents together in SBI format until it amounts to a public airing of grievances; or using it in front of several people in a meeting. In particular, if you only pull it out to criticize, the organization learns that “when an SBI sentence starts, you're in trouble,” and at that point the structure has stopped working.
Seungbin JeonAn instructor who draws on psychology expertise to support communication and leadership growth in organizations
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum ConsultingThe Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in the US developed and popularized it as a practical feedback technique within its leadership development programs. Variants such as SBI-I, which asks about the other person's intent after the Impact, are used alongside it.
Consider a hypothetical case: the consulting division (4 teams, 38 people) of Company A, a B2B systems integrator with 220 employees. In an anonymous survey right after the quarterly reviews, 41% responded that “feedback sounds like an evaluation of the person, not a conversation about the work,” and over the previous year five consultants with three years or less of experience had left. The division applied SBI as the standard for team-lead reviews for 12 weeks.
- At a workshop with seven team leads, Division Head Kim posted 32 review lines actually used last quarter on a whiteboard and said “let's keep only what a camera would capture.” Nineteen of them, including “lack of ownership,” were crossed out.
- Two days after the regular meeting with Client P, Team Lead Lee of the Technical Consulting Team met Senior Manager Park for 30 minutes and said only this: “At last Tuesday's meeting with P, when the delivery-date question came up three times, you had no answer, so I answered for you.”
- Keep the impact in the first person. The manager said, 'Since then, all 12 operational inquiries from Company P come to me. I'm becoming the bottleneck,' and said nothing about attitude or motivation.
- The question 'I'd like to hear what the situation was that day' revealed that a change to the delivery-date rule three weeks earlier had never reached the sales team, and the team fixed how materials are distributed that same week.
- To keep it from hardening into a criticism-only tool, the division fixed the first five minutes of the weekly meeting as “SBI praise” time, and 96 praise SBIs were logged over the 12 weeks.
- In the 12-week re-survey, the share saying it “sounds like an evaluation of the person” fell from 41% to 12%; average review prep time per team lead rose from 10 to 24 minutes; and disputes reopened after reviews dropped from 7 per quarter to 1.