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Closing the feedback loop

SBI, honest care, and the work of making feedback normal.

Every leadership cohort I work with, whether a room of police lieutenants, hospital directors, or corporate managers, eventually arrives at the same confession. Feedback is the part of the job they know matters most and practice least.

Cicely Simpson, a highly respected executive leadership and business advisor, recently named this the Feedback Trap, and I think she captured it well. Some leaders soften the message until it disappears, while others deliver it bluntly and never check whether it landed. From the outside, both can look like feedback. Neither one really helps a person grow.

For years, I have taught the Center for Creative Leadership’s Situation, Behavior, Impact model because it gets leaders out of that trap. It asks three simple questions.

When a leader prepares with those three questions, the softening falls away because the observation is specific, and the harshness falls away because the focus stays on behavior rather than on the person’s character. Much of what Cicely describes as clarity, a specific observation and a named impact, already lives inside SBI.

Where I see even well-trained leaders stumble is the moment after the impact is named. They deliver a clean SBI statement and then stop, or move on, assuming the message was received. That is exactly the gap Cicely points to when she observes that leaders rarely check whether their feedback was understood.

In the redirecting feedback worksheet I use in my programs, the fourth step is deliberately a question: ask for their context and viewpoint, with an open mind, and treat the conversation as shared discovery. CCL makes the same move by extending SBI to include Intent, asking what the person was hoping to accomplish. That one question turns a pronouncement into a conversation, and it is where real coaching begins.

New research from Bin Zhao, Fernando Olivera, and Amy Edmondson in Harvard Business Review gives this step real weight. Drawing on more than a decade of work on how people learn from errors, they found that clear feedback does not by itself produce learning. What matters is the emotion the feedback triggers and where that emotion sends a person’s attention. Guilt and regret about a specific action keep attention on the work. Shame and fear pull attention toward self-protection, and learning stalls.

SBI helps with the first part by keeping the message on behavior rather than identity. The follow-up question helps with the second.

A flawless SBI conversation delivered twice a year will not change a culture. Frequency changes a culture. Gallup’s research on what it calls fast feedback found that 80 percent of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week were fully engaged, and CCL’s own research shows employees rate managers as more effective when they give feedback more often. When feedback happens weekly, casually, and close to the moment, it loses its charge. It stops feeling like a verdict and starts feeling like how we work here.

This is why I teach reinforcing feedback first. If the only time a leader uses SBI is to correct someone, the model becomes the sound of trouble, and people brace themselves the moment they hear “at yesterday’s meeting.” When leaders use the same structure to name what went well, specifically and sincerely, the model becomes familiar and even welcome. By the time a redirecting conversation is needed, that person has already heard their leader describe situations, behaviors, and impacts many times, and most of those times it was good news.

People are also far more ready for honest feedback than their leaders assume. When Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman surveyed nearly 900 people for HBR, 57 percent said they preferred corrective feedback to praise, and 92 percent agreed that redirecting feedback, delivered appropriately, is effective at improving performance.

The phrase that matters there is delivered appropriately. That is the whole craft, and it demands practiced EQ.

In my work with leaders, I ask for a handful of habits rather than a new technique.

Honesty and care are not opposites to be balanced against each other. SBI gives honesty its precision, and the follow-up question and a steady rhythm give it care. When both are present often enough, feedback stops being an event people dread and becomes an ordinary part of how a team grows.