Sound familiar? Someone on your team talks over a colleague in the client meeting. Afterward you pull them aside and say, “You need to be a bit more aware of how you come across.” They nod. They look confused. Next week it happens again, and now you’re annoyed at them and at yourself, because you did give the feedback. Didn’t you?
You gave a verdict, not feedback. “Be more aware” asks the person to guess what you saw, why it mattered, and what to change. People often guess wrong, or guess defensively.
The SBI feedback model is the fix: feedback in three sentences, covering the Situation, the Behavior, and the Impact. It works because it removes the guessing. The hard part isn’t learning the three letters. It’s finding the wording when you’re nervous and the moment has passed. That’s what the Performance-Review Phrasing & Feedback Wording Bank is for: behavior-based phrasing for every competency, each phrase paired with the evidence it requires. The model itself fits on an index card, though, so here it is with the examples.
What is the SBI feedback model?
The SBI feedback model is a three-part structure for giving feedback: you describe the Situation where something happened, the specific Behavior you observed, and the Impact that behavior had. It’s taught by the Center for Creative Leadership, which describes SBI as a research-based method (opens in new tab) and says its research shows the approach reduces anxiety for the person giving feedback and defensiveness in the person hearing it.
It works because each part answers a question the listener would otherwise have to ask:
| Part | What it answers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | When and where? | “In Tuesday’s client call, during the pricing discussion…” |
| Behavior | What exactly did you see or hear? | “…you answered two of the questions the client had asked Priya directly…” |
| Impact | So what? | “…and she didn’t speak again for the rest of the call, so the client never heard the implementation plan she’d prepared.” |
Put together, that’s feedback the person can act on. Nobody has to decode it, and nothing in it is about their personality. SBI is a specific structure for the broader principle of behavior-based feedback: describe the work, not the person.
Situation: pin it to one moment
The Situation is the specific time and place the behavior happened: one meeting, one shift, one email thread, not “lately” or “always.” It anchors the conversation in a shared memory, so the other person can picture the same scene you’re describing.
- Weak: “In meetings…” / “Recently…” / “You always…”
- Strong: “In this morning’s stand-up…” / “On the Hendricks order last Thursday…” / “In the handoff email you sent Friday afternoon…”
“Always” and “never” are the fastest way to lose an SBI conversation. They invite a counter-example (“I didn’t do that on Monday”), and then you’re arguing about frequency instead of talking about the behavior. Pick one instance, the clearest one, even if it’s part of a pattern.
Behavior: what a camera would have recorded
The Behavior is the observable action: what the person said or did, described so neutrally that a video recording would confirm it. This is where feedback most often goes wrong, because it’s where we substitute our interpretation for what we saw.
A quick test: could someone argue with it? “You were dismissive” can be argued with, because it’s a judgment about attitude. “You looked at your phone while Sam was presenting and said ‘we’ve tried that’ before he finished” can’t, because it’s what happened.
| Judgment (avoid) | Observable behavior (use) |
|---|---|
| “You were rude” | “You said ‘that’s not my problem’ and hung up” |
| “You’re not a team player” | “You declined both requests to review Ana’s draft this week” |
| “Great attitude!” | “You stayed on the call until the customer’s account was restored” |
| “You were unprepared” | “You didn’t have the Q3 numbers when the director asked for them” |
| “You’re too negative” | “You raised four objections before the proposal had been fully presented” |
If you can’t describe the behavior without an adjective like lazy, careless, or aggressive, you don’t have feedback yet. You have a feeling. Go find the instance first.
Impact: the consequence, not your verdict
The Impact is what happened as a result of the behavior: to the work, to the team, to a customer, or to you. It’s what turns an observation into something that matters, and it’s what answers the silent “so what?”
Good impact statements are concrete:
- “…so the release slipped a day while we rebuilt the test data.”
- “…and the customer mentioned it in their renewal call as the reason they’re staying.”
- “…and two people told me afterward they didn’t feel they could disagree.”
- “…and honestly, I felt undermined, because it was my decision to announce.”
Two things to watch. First, impact on you is legitimate. The Center for Creative Leadership’s own SBI example (opens in new tab) is “I felt frustrated when you interrupted me because it broke my train of thought.” Just make sure it’s a real effect, not a disguised judgment (“I felt like you didn’t care” is a judgment wearing a feeling’s clothes). Second, impact is not a demand. “…so you need to stop doing that” is a request, and it can come after, once you’ve both talked. Lead with the consequence and let it do its work.
SBI feedback model examples
The same three-part structure works for praise, for course-corrections, and for feedback to peers or your own manager. Here are worked examples across common situations. All of them are illustrative. The names and details are invented, but the shapes are the ones managers deal with every week.
| Type | Situation | Behavior | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Positive | “In yesterday’s handover to the night shift…” | “…you walked Dev through the two open tickets instead of leaving notes…” | “…and neither one bounced back to us this morning, which is the first time this month.” |
| Developmental: missed deadline | “On the supplier report due Friday…” | “…it arrived Monday at 11, and I didn’t get a heads-up that it would be late…” | “…so I had to tell the ops director I didn’t have it, in the meeting where she asked.” |
| Developmental: meetings | “In this morning’s planning meeting…” | “…you cut in three times while Lena was walking through her estimate…” | “…and she dropped the last section, so we approved a timeline without her risk list.” |
| Positive: initiative | “When the booking system went down on Saturday…” | “…you set up the paper sign-in sheet and called the 2 p.m. clients to warn them…” | “…and we didn’t lose a single appointment. Three clients mentioned it.” |
| Upward (to your manager) | “In Thursday’s all-hands…” | “…the reorg was announced before our team had been told…” | “…so four people heard it from another team first, and I spent Friday answering questions I couldn’t answer.” |
| Peer | “On the shared proposal doc…” | “…my section was rewritten without a comment or a message…” | “…and I found out when the client quoted a figure I hadn’t written.” |
Notice what’s missing from every example: advice, adjectives, and the word “always.” That’s the discipline. Say those three things, then stop talking.
If you want those sentences ready before you need them, the Performance-Review Phrasing & Feedback Wording Bank has 24 behavior-not-personality rewrites of the phrases managers reach for by habit (“should speak up more,” “not a culture fit,” “has real potential”), each turned into a version that holds up when someone questions it.
SBII: adding intent to the SBI model
SBII, sometimes written SBI-I, adds a fourth step, Intent: after you describe the impact, you ask what the person was trying to do. CCL describes SBII (opens in new tab) as exploring the gap between intent and impact: people usually intend to do the right thing, and asking lets you find out what they meant instead of assuming.
The Intent step is a question, and then silence:
- “What was going on for you in that moment?”
- “What were you hoping would happen?”
- “Walk me through how you saw it.”
This is often where the useful information lives. The person who cut in on Lena may have been trying to save the meeting time because they knew the room was booked until 10. The late report may have been waiting on data from a team that missed its own deadline. You still need the behavior to change, but now you’re solving the actual problem.
Use SBII whenever you don’t already know why something happened, which is often. Plain SBI works best for praise and for quick, low-stakes course-corrections where the reason is obvious.
If the conversation keeps going after the question, you need follow-ups more than a script. That’s the idea behind the 1:1 Question Deck for Managers: every card carries the follow-up question that makes the first one count.
Common SBI feedback mistakes
The model is simple enough that the mistakes are predictable. These five are the ones that come up again and again:
- Sneaking the verdict into the Behavior. “You were disrespectful when you interrupted” has a judgment glued to the observation. Cut the adjective; the behavior carries the point on its own.
- Stacking up a list of instances. Six examples back to back isn’t SBI, it’s a case file, and it puts the person on trial. Lead with the single clearest instance. If there’s a pattern, you can say so once they’ve engaged: “It’s happened a few times; this was the clearest one.”
- Waiting too long. Feedback about a meeting three weeks ago asks the person to remember a scene they’ve forgotten. Give it within a day or two, while the Situation is still vivid to both of you.
- Using SBI as a compliment sandwich. SBI isn’t padding. Wrapping a developmental SBI in two vague compliments can teach people to brace whenever you praise them. Give praise on its own, as its own SBI, when it happens.
- Skipping the conversation. Delivering all three parts and walking away makes SBI feel like a citation. The structure is the opening, not the whole conversation, so ask the Intent question or at least “How do you see it?”
When SBI is the wrong tool
SBI is built for single, observable moments, which makes it a poor fit for a few situations managers face.
- Sustained performance problems. When one instance has become a pattern with consequences for someone’s role, you need a planned performance conversation with dated instances and a clear next step, not an in-the-hallway SBI. The walkthrough on how to start a performance conversation covers that, including what to do with the four replies you actually get.
- Anything touching health, disability, pregnancy, leave, or a complaint the person has made. Stop and talk to HR before you speak. The feedback might still be yours to give, but the order and timing matter.
- The annual review. A review summarizes a period, so one SBI instance can’t carry a rating on its own. SBI notes are the raw material a review is built from. They aren’t the review. Turning them into one is covered in how to write a performance review that holds up.
For the wider question of how feedback fits into regular check-ins, the post on how to run a one-on-one with your first employee covers the meeting SBI usually happens inside.
Common Questions About the SBI Feedback Model
Can you use SBI for positive feedback?
Yes, and you should. Positive feedback given as “great job” teaches nothing, because the person does not know which part to repeat. An SBI compliment names the exact behavior, which is what makes it likely to happen again.
How long should SBI feedback take?
The delivery itself is three or four sentences, well under a minute. The conversation afterward can take as long as it needs, but if your opening runs past a minute, you are probably explaining or justifying instead of describing.
What is the difference between SBI and SBII?
SBII adds a fourth step, Intent: after describing the impact, you ask what the person was trying to do. SBI is a statement; SBII turns it into a conversation. Use SBII whenever you do not already know why the behavior happened.
Who created the SBI feedback model?
SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) is taught by the Center for Creative Leadership, a leadership-development organization, which also publishes the SBII extension that adds Intent.
Can you use SBI in a written performance review?
Partly. A review summarizes a period, so a single SBI instance is too narrow to carry a rating on its own. But the SBI instances you noted during the year are exactly the evidence a review needs, which is the best reason to write them down when they happen.
Make the words easy to find
SBI takes a minute to learn. What’s hard is having the sentence ready when a moment calls for it, and still having it in March when the review form opens.
The Performance-Review Phrasing & Feedback Wording Bank is built on the same principle as SBI: every phrase is tied to the evidence it requires, and a Review Builder in Excel and Google Sheets turns a rating, a few slot picks and your evidence into finished review paragraphs. For the conversations that can’t wait for a review, the Manager’s Difficult-Conversations Script Bank scripts 15 of them word for word, including the four replies you’re likely to get. Both are files you buy once and keep, not another subscription tool.
