75. LEVELLING UP: How To Give People Feedback, A Simple Model You Can Use Today

The thing is, if you keep doing this, this leads to a culture of continual improvement. It's to the point in our organization now where people aren't afraid to speak up. Like they will actually say within a meeting, hang on a minute, this has been happening, this is where we want to go, let's have a talk about that. And it just becomes so free and easy and awesome. We've actually built these touch points into our meetings now and you need to do it in your organization if you want to improve.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast with your favorite MBA and high school dropout talking everything, crypto, business, personal growth and communication today. Because I'm not a great communicator at the best of times. And Bergs has a couple of examples of how to upframe communication, how to give feedback, how to talk to people properly, and a couple of specific examples. When I've barreled into the company, caused absolute ruckus with my my feedback and how we can improve it. So if you're in an organization where you're struggling to give feedback, maybe you're a manager, maybe you're an entrepreneur, maybe you're getting feedback from your boss and it's just not coming across the right way. Bergs is going to be delivering us how to give feedback in one of our first leveling up series on Ben and Bergs, how to level up yourself. Let's go Bergs. How to get feedback mate. Hit us.

Awesome. I'm really happy to do this one because it is one of those huge unlocks if you create a culture of feedback for high performance and improvement. And again, why do we need feedback? And simply it's just to improve, to discover blind spots. And it's not about like smashing people and bloody pissing them off and you know, saying things like, oh you're great, but that being said, and then just hammering in with some bullshit. And look, feedback is not good or bad, it just is. And it is so important when building a culture of continual improvement. So I'll give you an MBA model. It's very simple. It's called the SBI model Situation, behavior and impact. So let's go through those and then I'll give you a couple examples. So easy to do. So with this situation, you want to be very specific on the situation in which the behavior occurred. So you need to be as specific as possible and you actually want to deliver the feedback as close to the event as when it happens. So the closer it is, the better because it's in kind of fresh memory. And then you want to describe the behavior that happens. So the actual observable behavior and keep it factual and don't put any judgment in there. It is just, hey, this happened. And then you want to describe the impact. What impact did it have on you or the team or the people around you? And describe your feelings about what has happened. And then you can expand on this as well, and you can include another I, which is intent. So really, you want to kind of close the gap between intent versus impact. And. And it really kicks off the conversation because sometimes you'll be like, situation, behavior, impact. And then, like, the person will be like. And you kind of need to get that conversation flowing. And that will be like, hey, did you know this was happening? Or was this what you meant? And then it just gives them an opportunity to talk as well. All right, let's punch through an example with Ben. This is actually a real example, and I wrote this one down. So this. The situation was. I'll describe what was happening, and then I'll describe how I relate it to Ben for the feedback. So Ben was in the States, and I would come online in the morning, and, man, I got to tell you, in the product team chat, in one of our Slack channels during Ben's day, he would just drop these voice messages, be like, we need to do this, we need to do that. Just like all this bullshit. So I'd wake up, I'd have to go through each of those, and I was like, oh, my God, what the fuck is going on? And the whole team would see this as well, everyone in the product channel. And it's from the CEO. And I was like, look, we need to do this better. I need to say something to Ben because it's throwing the team into disarray and we just can't have this. Everyone's calling me in the morning going, oh, this is super important. We need to do this. And really, the things weren't that important. They were in that microsecond that was in Ben's head that he was operating and he'd been on a call with someone else. But in the grand scheme of things, probably not. So it's up to me to relay that back to Ben and give him the feedback. So here's what I did. I said, ben, mate, on Tuesday and Thursday this week, you posted a couple of messages in the Slack product Team challenge about a member's experience and changing the product. And this was on USA time. And when the team wakes up, we see a message from the CEO. The Message seems frantic and it throws us into a tailspin because you're the CEO and any message that you drop can carries high importance. And, mate, I just need to know, were these things urgent and did they need to be actioned straight away? Like, are these things we need to get on top of? And then Ben said to me, he's like, no. Like, when I think about it, I just came across it, like, this member told me this and I just had it in my head and I just had to get it out. Like, I had to let you guys know. And I said, oh, that's great to know. Because when you do that, there's emotional contagion. So everyone gets thrown into a task. Oh, my God. Whatever I was doing wasn't important. I have to do this. And what I said to Ben was, look, man, there was no urgency level placed on it. And I totally understand that you're in a different time zone and you've just had an experience with a member and you need to let us know and you need to get it out of your head into somewhere else before it pops out of your head or you don't want to keep it in there because you're doing so much. So I said, maybe there's a better place that we can actually place that. So we ended up creating a product ideas channel. Ben can put things in there and we've told everyone that this is just where the ideas go. They're not super important, but it's somewhere to collate it, to get it out of people's head heads. And honestly, it stopped all that, those frantic messages coming in. The team was a lot more together and a lot more focused after I provided that feedback to Ben and Ben, how did you feel when we actually had that conversation?

Yeah, it made a lot of sense. And also just listening back to you now, thinking about the way I was communicating to the team on those points. It'd be super stressful waking up to that. You don't know what I'm talking about. It's kind of like lacking context. There's six messages in a row. You probably miss one. You're like, what the fuck is going on? You have all these questions, everyone's got questions. And I'm asleep now because it's. I'm in the US type. Like, what a disaster. Now, actually, you know, and understanding that and getting sort of the context of how it comes across, that was the most important thing to me. And you really just frame that up for me, like, hey, just this is how we're receiving it, you know, this is what this is now, what's happening, because the way it's been delivered is causing this. If we did it this way, we could actually get a better outcome. It'd be less stressful and you'd get your result quicker. I'm like, oh, that sounds great, let's do that.

That's exactly right. Because it's about the situation and how to make that better and succeed as a company. It's not about the individual. Some things can be about the individual with specific behaviors, but it very rarely is. A classic example that they use when they're trying to teach. This is a person rocking up late to a meeting and they continually do it. And the way to address that kind of thing is not like, oh, this person's a dickhead. You know, they don't know how to get here on time. It's, hey, Tony. Yeah, I've noticed the last couple of meetings that we've had with this client, you've shown up about five or 10 minutes late. And what that does for us is it kind of signals to the client that, you know, we're not organized and they're not really important because you're not here on time. And I would ask them, I would say, hey, is, is anything going on? Is there anything I can do? Am I overloading you with work? Just give them an opportunity to actually talk about it. And it may be that they've got too much on. There might be something going on in their lives or they might not have realized that actually showing up on time was important because the boss was already there. And even with feedback like, it's not, it doesn't have to be positive or negative, it just is. And give feedback as much as you can to really drive that operational efficiency and to stop things that either upset you or throw a spanner in the works. Every weekly huddle that we have, we always do the positive shout outs at the end of it. We address any elephants in the room at the start, urgent and important things. And at the end we'll shout out the team member and we'll go through our list of values and we'll say, hey, Ben, you know, I'm going to shout you out for getting shit done and hungry to learn, improve and innovate. You smash like a million sales calls, you've got your sequence down. Seeing that is a beautiful thing. And seeing our sales increase has been absolutely amazing, mate. Like, that's just an awesome way. Using the Situation Behavior Impact model to give feedback to a colleague.

Brilliant man, Fantastic I love it. I'm going to use that framework. We'll drop those dot points in the comments below so you can use that. Thank you very much. Bergs. On our Leveling up series we're going to have more of these. If you like them, we'd love to hear your feedback. Bergs has got a bunch of different knowledge and little points of growth. So we're going to be launching more of these Leveling up series, little 5 to 10 minute clips when we can. Bergs. Thank you so much Ben. I know how to get feedback now.

Awesome mate. I look forward to receiving it.

I was going to say but just working through some stuff now.

No, I'm kidding actually before we go. The thing is if you keep doing this, this leads to a culture of continual improvement. It's to the point in our organization now where people aren't afraid to speak up. Like they will actually say within a meeting, hang on a minute. This has been happening. This is where we want to go. Let's have a talk about that. And it just becomes so free and easy and awesome. We've actually built these touch points into our meetings now and really it's not about the person, it's about the situation and you need to do it in your organization if you want to improve.

Yeah, bang on man. Lovely stuff. Thank you so much for listening Ben and Berg listeners. If you like this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend. Do you have someone that's giving you shitty feedback? Do you have a boss that's giving you shitty feedback? Is there a colleague? Is there a friend, family member? Is your dad giving you shitty feedback? Sending this video? Get them leveling out with the venom. Burke's podcast. We'd love for you to share it around how we grow the podcast. Thank you everyone. We'll see you next time.

Thanks champions.