Andrew's Digital Garden

Situation-Behaviour-Impact Feedback

The SBI feedback model is a structure to improve the effectiveness of feedback you give. It consists of three parts:

Situation The context of the situation. Be clear and specific. Don't use "the other day", use "in the meeting about x"

Behaviour The precise behaviour you want to address. Talk about what you observed, not the cause. The cause is unknown to you, but you can confidently talk about what you've observed. Be objective here, but understanding of humans.

Impact Highlight the impact of the person's behaviour on the people around them, including yourself. Use personal pronouns like "I" and similar to once again, ground it in your observation.

Rather than giving hollow praise, SBI helps give concrete, and actionable feedback. This is often preferred and helps people grow. Remember to still try and frame things positively. This isn't a tool to assign blame.

You can also use the SBI-I framework, which stands for Intent. This encourages a conversation behind the intent of someone's behaviour, and lets you both dig deeper into what's happened.

[[career]] [[engineering]] [[management]]

Situation-Behaviour-Impact Feedback