Giving Feedback That Works: Specific, Task-Focused, Forward-Looking

The previous lesson in this course established the core finding: feedback works when it keeps attention on the task and carries information, and it backfires when it pulls attention toward the person. Hattie and Timperley (2007) turned that into three questions that effective feedback answers:

Most workplace feedback answers only the middle question, and often only as a verdict ("this isn't there yet"). Without the first, the person cannot tell what standard they missed. Without the third, they know something is wrong but not what to do about it.

Key idea: If you can only say one of the three, say the third. A concrete next step keeps attention on the work almost by construction.

The most widely taught workplace structure is Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI), from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL):

1. Situation: when and where. "In Tuesday's client call..."
2. Behavior: what the person observably did, described as a camera would record it. "...you answered the pricing question before the client had finished asking it..."
3. Impact: the effect it had on you, the team or the outcome. "...and they repeated the question twice, which used ten minutes we had planned for the demo."

CCL later added a fourth step, Intent, making SBII: ask what the person was trying to do. "What were you aiming for there?"

The reason SBI tends to work is not the acronym. Each step forces task-level content: a specific moment, an observable action, a concrete consequence. It is hard to say something about someone's personality while describing what a camera would have seen.

Definition: Behaviour means an observable action ("you interrupted twice"), not an interpretation ("you were dismissive") or a trait ("you're arrogant").

It is worth being precise about what is known.

Nothing here argues against using SBI. It argues against treating it as magic. A comment can follow the format perfectly and still fail, for instance if the "impact" is really a judgement ("...and it made you look unprepared") that drags attention straight back to the self.

Most unhelpful feedback is not harsh. It is vague. Here are common comments and task-level rewrites:

The rewrites share three features: a specific moment or artefact, an observable action, and something to do next. The last row matters most. Terms like "presence", "polish" or "attitude" feel like feedback but contain no instruction, and they leave the recipient to guess.

Try it: Take a comment you are about to give and ask: could the person act on this tomorrow without asking me what I meant? If not, it is not finished.

Vague feedback is not only less useful. It is also where inconsistency between people creeps in, because a vague standard gets applied differently to different people.

Shelley Correll and Caroline Simard of Stanford's Clayman Institute analysed written performance reviews at three technology companies and one professional services firm, and reported their findings in Harvard Business Review in 2016. They found women were systematically less likely than men to receive specific feedback tied to business outcomes, in both praise and developmental comments, and that when women did receive specific developmental feedback it focused disproportionately on communication style.

The mechanism is general. "Needs more presence" or "a bit too aggressive" can mean anything, so it absorbs the evaluator's expectations about the person. "Missed the Q3 revenue target by 8%" means the same thing whoever it is written about.

Gotcha: Before sending review comments, read the feedback you wrote for several people side by side. Check whether everyone got comments tied to outcomes, or whether some people got numbers and others got adjectives.

Managers often avoid corrective feedback on the assumption that people do not want it. A survey by the leadership consultancy Zenger Folkman of more than 2,500 employees, published in Harvard Business Review in 2014, suggests otherwise: 57% said they preferred corrective feedback and 43% preferred praise or recognition, and 72% said their performance would improve if their managers gave them corrective feedback.

Two cautions apply. These are stated preferences in a survey, not measured performance, and people may say they want criticism more readily than they welcome it in the moment. And the meta-analytic evidence from lesson one found that the sign of feedback, positive or negative, did not explain which interventions helped.

The manager talks for the first two messages and listens for most of the rest.

In the conversation above, the colleague, not the manager, proposes what to do next time. That choice is deliberate.

• It surfaces missing context. The intent question in SBII often reveals that the behaviour had a reason: the pricing answer was rushed because sales had promised a demo slot that did not exist. The fix may belong to someone else.
• It keeps attention on the task. Designing a solution is task-level work. Listening to a list of instructions invites the recipient to evaluate the person giving them.
• It creates a check. If the proposed step would not solve the problem, you learn that the standard was not understood, before anyone relies on it.

The follow-up step matters as much as the conversation. Feedback without a later check leaves the recipient unsure whether the change was noticed or whether it mattered at all.

In practice: Agree a specific date to look at the result together, and when the change happens, say so specifically. That is positive task-level feedback, and it closes the loop the first conversation opened.

Run through this before any feedback that matters.

1. Goal: can I state the standard or goal this is measured against? (feed up)
2. Moment: do I have a specific situation, not a pattern described from memory?
3. Behaviour: have I described what a camera would record, with no adjectives about the person?
4. Impact: is the impact a consequence for the work, not a judgement about them?
5. Next step: is there one concrete thing to do differently, or to keep doing? (feed forward)
6. Question: have I planned to ask for their view before concluding?
7. Consistency: would I give the same comment, in the same words, to anyone else on the team who did this?

Key idea: Every item on the list keeps attention on the task and adds information. That is the whole method; SBI and the three questions are ways of remembering to do it.