You will be able to give feedback that covers situation, behaviour and impact, then ends with a question.
When a colleague's work keeps causing you problems, the first sentence that comes to mind is usually a verdict about them: they are careless, unreliable, difficult. Saying that out loud rarely helps. Feedback that describes a person's character, instead of something they did, tends to make them defensive, and the behaviour stays the same. When a harsh feedback sentence fails, the cause is often that it targets the person instead of the action, more than the harshness itself.
The Center for Creative Leadership, a leadership training organisation, teaches a structure for this called situation, behaviour, impact (SBI). You describe when and where it happened (the situation), what the person did (the behaviour), and what effect it had (the impact). It contains no labels and no guesses about why the person did it. Feedback built this way is hard to argue with, because the other person can check every part of it and none of it comments on their character.
Farhan, the operations executive from Lesson 1.3, "Know what your reader needs before you write", has a problem of this kind. His team plans the warehouse schedule each morning from a booking list sent by Kumar in customer service. The list should arrive by 9am, but for three weeks it has arrived closer to 11 (invented figures, as are the others in this case).
Farhan decides to speak up. His first draft is: "Kumar, you're always late with the list and it's really unprofessional." Said that way, Kumar would most likely get defensive and point out that he has been handling twice the calls since a colleague left. They would both end the conversation annoyed, and the list would still be late.
So Farhan rebuilds it with SBI: "Kumar, can I talk to you about the morning booking list? Over the last three weeks, it's been reaching us closer to 11 than 9. Because we plan the warehouse schedule from it, the forklift team starts the first loads late, and twice we've missed the noon truck to our client in Tuas." Then he asks an open question and listens.
The situation needs to be specific: "last Tuesday's client call", or "the booking list over the last three weeks". Vague framings such as "in general" or "always" fail, because the listener immediately thinks of the exceptions and argues with those.
Describing the behaviour is the hardest part. Most people jump from what they saw to what they concluded, and then say the conclusion. A useful check is the camera test: if a camera could record it, it is behaviour; if a camera could not, it is interpretation. A camera can record someone joining a client call ten minutes late. It cannot record "you're unreliable". It can record an email reply that says "noted" without answering the question. It cannot record "you don't care about this project".
A label is an interpretation of behaviour that a camera could not record, such as unreliable, careless, unprofessional or negative. When you give someone a label, they defend themselves against the label instead of hearing what happened. Some rewrites from label to behaviour:
"You're so disorganised" becomes: the slides for Thursday's pitch arrived at 11pm the night before. "You were rude to the client" becomes: when the client asked about the delay, you said "that's not my department" and moved on. "You don't pull your weight" becomes: in the last two sprints, three of your five tasks moved to the next sprint.
Each rewrite is more specific, and often easier to say, because you are describing something you both saw instead of accusing.
Impact is the effect on you, the team, the client or the work. It is what makes the feedback worth giving, because it explains why the behaviour matters. State it as something you could show. "Twice we missed the noon truck" is a fact. "You've made us look bad to the client" is an accusation presented as impact.
Impact on yourself is valid and honest. "I stayed until 9pm to redo the slides" is a fact about your evening. "You don't respect my time" is a claim about what is in the other person's mind, and they will dispute it. If a plan changed without a message and you spent two hours on a version nobody needed any more, say that.
Keep your voice level. Calm delivery and specific facts carry more weight than visible frustration.
SBI ends with an open question. Once you have stated the impact, stop talking and ask something like "What's been happening on your side?" Then listen properly, because the other person often knows something you do not.
When Farhan asks, Kumar explains that since Jamie left, he has been covering the morning calls alone, and the list is only finalised once the last overnight booking comes in. Farhan says he did not know that. He suggests Kumar send whatever he has at 9, then a short update once the late bookings are in. Kumar says that is easy and he can do it. The question turned a complaint into a shared problem, with a fix neither of them would have found alone. If Farhan had opened with "unprofessional", he would never have heard about Jamie.
Sometimes the other person gets defensive anyway. Do not repeat your point more loudly. Go back to the facts and the question, and make clear you are trying to solve the problem, not assign fault. Farhan might say: "I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm trying to work out how we get the trucks out on time."
The full sequence is: name a specific situation, describe only what a camera could record, state the impact calmly as a checkable fact, stop and ask an open question about their side, listen for what you did not know, and agree a fix together.
Think of a time in the last month when a colleague's work affected yours: a late handover, a missing reply, a meeting that ran over because they arrived unprepared. Before you write anything, check each part against the tests above. Could a camera record the behaviour? Is the impact something you could show with a fact? And what do you genuinely not know about their side of it, which your question could find out?
Pick one real case where a colleague's work affected yours. Write feedback about it using situation, behaviour and impact, and end with an open question.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).