How do you give and ask for feedbacks? What?s your strategy for structuring the feedback so it is can be better received? What if your peer push back on your feedback?
One of the most interesting topic for becoming manager is the feedbacks. Your feedback has to be timely, be specific and be actionable. But in the mean time, the strategy for structuring the feedback is equally important.
One of the strategy is called SBI, where S stands for situation, B stands for Behavior, I stands for impact. It suggest you to structure your feedback into three parts:
- On the Situation part, you share the situation where the behavior is captured.
- On the behavior part, you share the behaviors which you think could be improved.
- On the impact part, you share the impact of these unexpected behavior.
SBI structure helps you focus on the behavioral feedbacks, on the examples and on the impact. And of course, you should expect push back from the other side about your feedback many times. In these situations, try to stand your ground. Remember, it?s not your job to please someone, it?s your job to communicate clearly what?s the expected behavior of someone.
SBI can also be used on the hard conversations, for example, performance improvement plan. For hard conversation, it is suggested that we don?t try to avoid the real topic by having hiding agendas. It is better to directly shares with the other party that you have will some hard conversation with them and what is your concern. Then you share the SBI of these behaviors and ask for the perspective .
It is very common that you would receive push back during hard conversations, people might come back to you for all different reasons. But you will need to remember to stand on your ground(again), and push it through. Some of the tips including send out document before hand and allow them to be digested, and try to use ?and? instead of but on your conversation. You need to let people know that you totally get their concern, but the behavior didn?t really match the expectation and is a problem for you.