Give Feedback with the SBI Model

Part 1 was all about the receiving end: taking a hard comment without letting your defenses run the show. Now the tables turn. In this chapter you move to the harder, active side, giving feedback yourself, and doing it in a way the other person can actually hear. The tool for that is a simple, widely used model called SBI, and getting it right is one of the most useful things you can do for any team you are part of.

What Is the SBI Model?

Imagine a teammate keeps turning up late to your group’s planning calls, and it is starting to grate. The tempting thing to say is, “you’re so unreliable.” It feels honest, but watch what it does: it is a verdict on who they are, it gives them nothing specific to change, and it practically invites an argument. There is a cleaner way to say the same thing, and it comes in three parts.

SBI is a simple model for giving feedback, from the Center for Creative Leadership. It stands for Situation, Behavior, and Impact, and you deliver them in that order.

• Situation: when and where it happened, so the feedback is anchored to a specific moment rather than a general complaint. “On our Monday planning calls this month …”

• Behavior: what the person observably said or did, the part a camera would have caught. “… you’ve joined about ten minutes late each time …”

• Impact: the effect that behavior had on you or the team. “… so we keep restarting, and we lose the first stretch of the meeting.”

Put the three together and you get: “On our Monday calls this month, you’ve joined about ten minutes late each time, so we keep restarting and lose the first stretch of the meeting.” Notice what is gone: the word “unreliable,” and every other verdict about the person. What is left is a specific situation, an observable behavior, and a real effect, three things someone can look at without having to defend who they are. That is the whole point of SBI: it keeps feedback about something a person did, at a particular time, with a real result, instead of about the kind of person they are.

Keep Behavior and Impact Free of Verdicts

The B and the I are where SBI most often goes wrong, so they are worth slowing down on. Both have to describe what happened, not deliver a judgment about the person.

Make the Behavior Pass the Camera Test

Behavior has to be an observation, something a camera could actually have recorded, and not an evaluation, a judgment about the person. “You interrupted me twice while I was explaining” is a behavior; a camera would catch it. “You were dismissive” is an evaluation; no camera can film “dismissive,” it is your verdict on who they are. The moment an evaluation slips into the Behavior slot, SBI stops working, because the other person hears the judgment, braces, and defends, which is the exact reaction you were trying to avoid.

The test is quick: ask whether a camera could have recorded it. If yes, it is behavior you can use. If it is really a conclusion about who they are, keep digging for the specific thing they actually said or did.

Keep the Impact to a Real Effect

The same trap can sneak into the Impact. An impact is a concrete effect, something that observably happened: “I lost my train of thought,” “the booking never got logged,” “we missed the deadline.” It is not a character charge dressed up as a feeling, like “it made me feel you don’t respect us.” That is still a verdict, just wearing an “I feel” costume. Keep the Impact to what actually happened, and it stays as hard to argue with as the behavior.

Deliver SBI So It Can Be Heard

A clean SBI message can still land badly if you drop it at the wrong moment or fire it across a crowded room. This is where Part 1 comes back. On the receiving end you learned to separate the message from the delivery; now, as the giver, the delivery is your job to get right. Three things make SBI easier to hear.

• Pick the moment. Give it privately and reasonably soon after, not in front of the whole group and not weeks later. A good message at a bad moment still stings.

• State it plainly. Walk through Situation, Behavior, Impact in order, without burying it in apologies or small talk. Clear is kinder than vague.

• Then ask. SBI opens a conversation, it is not a verdict you read out. Once you have said your three parts, hand it over: “That’s how it looked from where I sat, how did it seem to you?” That one question turns feedback from a lecture into an exchange, and it gives the other person the room to respond that you would want if the roles were reversed.

Build One SBI Message Step by Step

Let us build one from scratch. A school parent-teacher association, or PTA, runs a small committee that organizes fundraising events. One member, Dan, keeps agreeing to tasks and then not finishing them, and another member, Rosa, has had enough. What she wants to say is, “Dan, you’re completely unreliable.” Let us turn that into something he can actually use.

First, the Situation. Rosa pins it to a specific, recent moment rather than a general reputation: “Dan, at last week’s meeting you took on booking the hall for the summer fair.”

Next, the Behavior, and here she runs the camera test. Not “you dropped the ball” (a verdict), but what a camera would have seen: “… and as of today the booking hasn’t been made, and I only found out because the venue rang to ask if we still wanted the date.”

Then the Impact, kept to a concrete effect rather than a charge about his character: “… so we may now lose our first-choice date, and I’ve had to chase it at the last minute.” Notice what she does not say: “it makes me feel like you don’t care about the fair.” That would be a verdict smuggled in as a feeling. She sticks to what observably happened, a date at risk and a last-minute scramble.

Finally, she hands it over instead of lecturing: “That’s how it’s looked from my end, what’s going on with it?” Put together, it runs: “Dan, at last week’s meeting you took on booking the hall, and as of today it hasn’t been booked, so we may lose our date and I’ve had to chase it. What’s going on with it?” Same underlying frustration as “you’re unreliable,” but now Dan has a specific situation, an observable behavior, and a real effect in front of him, and a question to answer rather than an insult to fight. Maybe he had a reason, maybe he simply forgot; either way, the conversation can now go somewhere useful.

Your Turn!

Now you build an SBI message yourself, on paper.

The situation. You volunteer at a community food bank. One of the other volunteers, Ravi, often leaves the sorting area in a mess at the end of a shift, and today another volunteer snaps, “Ravi, you’re so careless, you never clean up after yourself.”

Your task. Rewrite that blaming complaint as one clear SBI message. Write all three parts:

• a Situation that pins it to a specific, recent moment;

• a Behavior that passes the camera test, the observable thing Ravi did, with no verdict about the kind of person he is;

• an Impact that names a concrete effect on the team, not a charge about his character dressed up as a feeling.

Then add the one-line question you would use to hand it over.

Work this out in your own words, from your own read of the moment, rather than asking an AI tool to generate it for you. Turning a blaming complaint into a clean SBI message is the exact skill you are building here.

Let’s Recap!

• SBI is a three-part model for giving feedback: Situation (when and where), Behavior (what a camera would see), and Impact (the concrete effect).

• Naming a specific behavior and its real effect beats a global verdict like “unreliable,” because it gives the person something they can actually respond to and change.

• The Behavior must be an observation, not an evaluation; the moment a judgment slips into it, the other person braces and stops listening.

• Keep the Impact to something that observably happened, not a character charge wrapped in “I feel.”

• Deliver it well: pick a private moment, state the three parts plainly, then ask for their view, so feedback becomes a conversation rather than a verdict.

Giving clear feedback is one active skill; handling the friction that shows up when people simply want different things is the other. In the next chapter, we turn to disagreement, starting with the move that keeps it from turning personal: separating the people from the problem.