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Mentoring & Giving Feedback — SBI Model

Use SBI (Situation → Behavior → Impact) for feedback. Coaching asks questions; mentoring gives direction. Know which mode the other person needs.

When to use

  • 1:1s, code review comments, performance reviews
  • Any time someone needs to grow, not just when they make mistakes

Tradeoffs

  • Too much feedback at once overwhelms and is not retained
  • Positive-only feedback stunts growth — people need honest signals to improve

Models​

  • SBI: Situation (when/where) → Behavior (what they did, observable) → Impact (effect on team/product/user)
  • GROW: Goal → Reality → Options → Will (coaching framework for growth conversations)
  • Delegation ladder: Tell → Sell → Consult → Agree → Advise → Inquire → Delegate (calibrate autonomy)

SBI Examples​

Positive:

Situation: In yesterday's incident review. Behavior: You documented the root cause and three action items before anyone asked. Impact: The team had clarity within an hour and we avoided a repeat.

Constructive:

Situation: In the PR you opened yesterday. Behavior: The function handles 5 different cases with nested conditionals. Impact: It took me 20 minutes to understand it, and I still found a missed edge case. Can we refactor it together?

Critical:

Situation: In last week's design review. Behavior: You dismissed the reliability concerns without addressing them. Impact: The team moved forward without a mitigation plan, and we hit that exact failure mode in prod on Friday.

Gotcha: Code review comments are feedback. "This is wrong" violates SBI — no situation, no observable behavior, no impact. "This approach creates a data race under concurrent reads (behavior), which causes silent data corruption in prod (impact)" is actionable.