How to give difficult feedback

The Daily Drip

Simon Sinek has a framework for providing feedback. I'm pretty sure he didn't invent it and I know that plenty of other people have similar frameworks.

Let's just use his to get the point across.

It's not the shit sandwich, where you give positive feedback, negative feedback, and then more good feedback. In fact, most people are familiar with this method which makes it feel disingenuous.

Here's the acronym:
F - Feeling
B - Behavior
I - Impact

So, let's turn this into a template sentence.

"I feel ____ when you do ____ because it does ____."

Let's just say we're giving feedback to an employee who was late to an important meeting. Effective feedback would then sound something like this:

"I felt disappointed when you were 15 minutes late to the design meeting because it makes the rest of the team feel like they're not important and because it puts our project behind."

Boom. This framework delivers the full picture of how one person's actions impact others.

Strangely, I haven't seen a lot of conversation around using this same framework for providing praise or recognition.

Let's say that employee performed well in that meeting instead.

Praise might look something like:

"I felt so proud when you delivered that presentation because it showed how forward-thinking and effective our firm is to those candidate clients."

Okay, that's it for today. Take this and run with it.