The adage runs that people fear public speaking more than death. The reality at work is that people fear giving and receiving feedback even more than public speaking. The cost of that fear is high. Feedback-rich cultures outperform feedback-poor ones on almost every measurable axis.* Yet most teams talk about feedback constantly and deliver it rarely.

What gets in the way is the absence of a structure. Without one, feedback becomes a personal judgment or a vague suggestion. With one, it becomes a shared piece of information the team can act on.

The Center for Creative Leadership built such a structure. They call it SBI: Situation, Behavior, Impact. Three beats. In that order. No more.

Situation.

The specific context. When did this happen. Where. With whom in the room. The situation grounds the feedback in a moment the other person can recall.

Behavior.

The observable action. Not your interpretation of the action. Not what you assume motivated it. What you literally saw or heard. The discipline of staying with the observable is what keeps the feedback from drifting into character judgment.

Impact.

The result the behavior had on the team, the client, the project. Naming the impact is what turns the feedback from a description into a piece of useful information.

A worked example, positive:

"During yesterday's client meeting, you asked three questions about their actual workflow before introducing the solution. It moved the conversation from a pitch to a conversation, and they brought up two more constraints we hadn't heard yet."

A worked example, constructive:

"In this morning's team brainstorming session, you interrupted two team members mid-sentence. It cut off their lines of thought before the rest of the team could engage with them."

Three properties make SBI feedback land. Timeliness. As close to the event as possible. Specificity. Observable actions only, not assumptions about intent. Meaning. Connected to a goal the receiver already cares about.

The connection to people readiness.

People readiness is the variable that decides whether a team is in a position to deliver what is being asked of it. The Team Relationship dimension our assessments measure, among other things, whether feedback flows in both directions. Teams that score high on this dimension share one operational habit: they have a structure for giving feedback that does not require anyone to be brave to use it. SBI is that structure. The model is what makes the conversation possible at all.

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