Five questions to answer before a difficult conversation, so you can have it clearly, kindly and in a way that leads to action.
You know which one it is.
Someone on your team needs to hear something. You have found a reason to wait. It is a busy week. They seem stressed. You will do it after the review.
That is not kindness. It is avoidance with good manners.
Meanwhile the person keeps doing the thing, and you keep working around it. The rest of the team notices both.
Everyone says they want better feedback. Training Industry’s 2025 research, surveying 291 learning leaders, ranked communication and feedback as the leadership skill most in demand. And in LRN’s 2016 HOW Report, only 8% of organisations scored high on speaking out, which includes giving honest feedback.
Wanting it and doing it are different things.
Five questions. Five minutes.
Answer these before you open your mouth.
1. What did I actually see or hear? Facts, not conclusions. “The handover was missing the delivery times” is a fact. “You are careless” is an insult.
2. What did it cost? The work, the team, the customer. If you cannot name a cost, you may not need the conversation. If you can, you do.
3. What do I want instead? Specific. “Be more careful” is useless. “Put the delivery times on every handover” is something a person can do on Monday.
4. What am I missing? You might be wrong. You might not have the full picture. Go in curious and the conversation goes better.
5. What happens next, and by when? No next step, no conversation. It was just a chat.
You have just used SBI
Questions 1 and 2 are the core of a simple model called SBI: Situation, Behaviour, Impact.
Situation. When and where. “Tuesday’s handover.”
Behaviour. What you saw or heard, and nothing more. “The delivery times were missing.”
Impact. What it cost. The work, the team, the customer.
Fact, fact, cost. No labels, no guesses about why. That is why it works: the other person has nothing to argue with except what happened.
Questions 3 to 5 are what comes after SBI: what you want instead, what you might be missing, and what happens next.
The first sentence
This is the part people avoid, so keep it short. Start with the situation:
“I want to talk about Tuesday’s handover. Do you have ten minutes?”
Then give the behaviour and the impact, and ask what they think. Then stop talking and listen.
Reading about it is the easy part
Saying it out loud is hard. That is why you practise.
On Thursday 26 November I am running a live 60 minute session, “The Conversation You’ve Been Putting Off”. We practise the SBI model with pair practice in breakout rooms, examples from Irish workplaces such as a manufacturing floor, a busy kitchen and a family business, and a one page guide to keep. Online on Teams, 12.30 to 1.30pm. Not recorded.
Details are on the feedback session page.
