Use SBI for positive feedback, not just correction

Name the situation, behavior, and impact when someone does something right.

Why it works

Generic praise ("great job") carries almost no information and its reward signal fades quickly. Specific SBI-structured positive feedback tells the person precisely what to repeat and why it mattered, which reinforces the behavior through both informational learning and the stronger affective hit of understood appreciation.

How to do it

1. Notice a specific moment when someone did something effective.
2. Name the situation, describe the behavior you saw, say the impact it had — using the same SBI structure.
3. Deliver it promptly; the closer to the event, the stronger the associative reinforcement.

Evidence

Specific behavioral praise outperforms generic praise in both educational and workplace settings for sustaining behavior; this aligns with operant conditioning principles and with specificity as an active ingredient of effective reinforcement. (observational)

Most specificity-of-praise research is in educational settings; generalization to adult professional contexts is plausible but less directly studied.

Common mistake

Saving SBI only for criticism, which means people only hear the model as a threat signal — instead of building the trust and safety that makes critical SBI land well.