Feedback is a gift.

Have you ever had a meeting scheduled on your calendar for 8:00 AM on a Monday morning, with your manager, with the title: "Feedback"?

What was the feeling that went through your mind? If you answer honestly, I'm guessing you're thinking that you are going to be told about something you did wrong, or given feedback on something you need to improve.

If we, as leaders, are providing feedback in a fair and balanced manner, we should be giving as much positive feedback as we are giving critical or "opportunity-based" feedback. I'm guessing all of you, like me, strive to hire top performers. If that is truly the case, it's probably fair to say that any given member of our teams drive and exhibit over 90% positive behaviors and traits. The negative or opportunity-based behaviors are probably significantly less than 10%.

If this is the case, shouldn't the feedback we give mirror those percentages? Shouldn't the members of our teams expect that 90% of the time when they get that 8:00 AM Monday meeting, that it should be to walk them through the amazing things they are doing?

(hint: the answer is "yes.")

Having said all of that... how should we give feedback? Feedback usually revolves around coaching and/or recognition. Those two things can go hand-in-hand. Coaching can involve giving feedback about something awesome they do and how to continue to do it, how to help others do it, etc.

What I have learned over the years, from my own perspective of being coached or receiving feedback as well, is that feedback like, "Kevin, you did an awesome job last week," or "Kevin, you were overbearing last week" doesn't help me improve with critical feedback or repeat positive feedback.

Words like "awesome" and "overbearing" are judgements. Chances are I felt very good about being told I was awesome, but couldn't go out the next day and understand how to repeat "awesome." Chances are also good that when I was told that I was overbearing, I was hurt, got defensive, and felt that I didn't set out to be overbearing. That's where Situation - Behavior - Impact (or SBI) comes in.

Situation: This needs to be specific so the member of the team knows exactly where they were and can pinpoint in their memory what happened. (e.g. "Last Friday in the staff meeting when Cheryl was presenting...")

Behavior: This isn't a judgement of any kind, this is simply a very specific and detailed description of the behavior. (e.g. "You waited for her to finish, and gave supporting examples that supported the point she was trying to make.")

Impact: This is important, at this point it's easy to fall back and say "and that was awesome" or "and that was overbearing." You need to focus on the impact that their behavior had - this way they can consider "was the impact that was the outcome of my actions what I hoped to convey?" (e.g. "Cheryl was very excited and and the group chimed in with other examples that were supportive of Cheryl's proposal.").

The same goes for Critical Feedback.

Situation: At yesterday's staff meeting, while Tom was presenting his proposal for the Sales program...

Behavior: You interrupted him multiple times with examples of why his program might not work...

Impact: And eventually Tom skipped his final slides and concluded his presentation and sat down without getting approval for his proposal.

Neither of these situations judges the individual, and gives them the opportunity to simply consider the situation and determine if the outcome was what they hoped or intended would happen.

What to do with it: Remember the title of this article? Feedback is a gift. When we give critical feedback, even if we do it in our best SBI format, it is easy for individual (and us as well) to feel attacked and try to explain or justify our actions. When we attack or defend the feedback, we don't internalize or accept it, and we encourage the individual providing it, to not do so again.

So we need to coach our teams to consider feedback as a gift. It takes courage to give someone feedback, critical or positive. When they do take the time to invest in us, we need to

1. Say thank you.
2. Don't defend or over-react
3. Don't say anything else.
4. Consider the feedback. Is this something we've heard before that is defining a line and we should work with our manager or our mentor to build a development plan, or is this a single datapoint, or an anomaly and we should just keep an eye on it?

In the end, coaching and feedback is one of the most important things we do. Coaching, Leading, Managing - they are all mission critical components of what we do and they often overlap.

Oh, and don't forget, all of these components apply to how we take feedback!