About this series: This is Part 2 of the Mentorship Series — posts written for junior managers, new team leads, and anyone in the early stages of a leadership career in CX and support. Part 1 covered the identity shift of moving from agent to team lead and how to structure your first 90 days. This post tackles the skill that separates managers who develop people from managers who just manage them: the ability to give feedback that actually changes behaviour.
There are two ways new managers typically give feedback, and both of them don’t work.
The first is avoidance. The feedback is clear in the manager’s head. The problem is visible, sometimes obvious. But the conversation doesn’t happen — because it feels uncomfortable, because the relationship feels too close, because they tell themselves it’ll sort itself out, or because they don’t know exactly how to start. I wrote about the cost of that avoidance in the Barbershop Leadership Series — it’s real, it compounds, and it always comes due eventually.
The second is the feedback sandwich. You’ve seen it. A compliment, then the actual feedback, then another compliment to soften the landing. It was probably taught to you at some point as good management practice. The problem is that it doesn’t work — not because the structure is wrong in theory, but because the human brain is very good at filtering for what it wants to hear. When you lead with a positive, the person relaxes. When the critical observation arrives, they half-hear it. When you close with another positive, they leave feeling okay about themselves and having absorbed approximately 20% of what you needed them to hear.
Effective feedback is neither of those things. It’s specific, it’s timely, it’s forward-facing, and it respects the other person enough to be direct.
The structure that actually works.
The model I’ve used and taught for years is a variation on the Situation-Behaviour-Impact (SBI) framework, adapted for day-to-day management rather than formal performance reviews. It’s not complicated. The discipline is in using it consistently rather than reverting to instinct.
Situation. Ground the feedback in a specific, observable event. Not “you often seem disengaged in meetings.” That’s a pattern claim, and the person’s immediate response will be to mentally search for counter-examples. Instead: “In yesterday’s team huddle, when I asked for input on the backlog, you were looking at your phone and didn’t respond.” That happened. It’s specific. It’s not a character judgment — it’s a description of a moment.
Behaviour. Describe what you observed without interpreting the motivation behind it. The behaviour is what happened. The interpretation — “you don’t care,” “you’re checked out,” “you’re not a team player” — is a conclusion you’ve drawn that may or may not be accurate, and it will immediately put the other person on the defensive. Stay with the observable. “You were on your phone and didn’t respond when I asked for input” is a behaviour. “You don’t respect team meetings” is a judgment. One of these leads to a conversation. The other leads to a dispute.
Impact. Be honest about the effect. This is the part most new managers underplay — they state the behaviour and then trail off, as though the observation alone is sufficient. It isn’t. The person needs to understand why it matters. “When that happens, it slows down the huddle because I have to move on without the context you’d have been able to give. It also affects how the rest of the team perceives engagement during team time.” That’s the impact. It connects the behaviour to real consequences, which is what makes the feedback land as important rather than as nitpicking.
Ask, then direct. This is an addition I’ve made to the standard model. After the impact, I ask a question rather than immediately giving direction: “Is there something going on that I should know about?” or “What was happening for you in that moment?” You might learn something — a distraction, a misunderstanding about the meeting’s purpose, a personal situation you weren’t aware of. Or you might learn nothing, and the question itself signals that you’re managing the person, not just correcting the behaviour. Then you close with the expectation: “Going forward, I need phones away during huddles and active participation when I ask the team for input.”
Timely means within 24 hours.
Feedback loses power with time. The event you’re referencing becomes fuzzy, the context fades, and the conversation starts to feel like a grievance being aired rather than a real-time response to something that happened. The window for effective feedback is roughly 24 hours — close enough to the event that both of you remember it clearly, far enough removed that neither of you is still in the emotional state of the moment itself.
New managers often wait for the next one-on-one to deliver feedback that should have been given the same day or the next morning. If your one-on-ones are weekly, that means a piece of feedback about Tuesday’s behaviour lands on the following Monday. By then, the person has had five days to either repeat the behaviour (because no one corrected it) or move on entirely (because they’ve forgotten it happened). Neither is the outcome you wanted.
Build the habit of giving feedback quickly. Not in the moment — that’s often too hot, and it can embarrass someone in front of their peers. But quickly. A brief conversation at the end of the day or a short one-on-one the following morning is almost always more effective than saving it for the weekly cadence.
Positive feedback is a skill, not a nicety.
Most managers think of positive feedback as the easy part — the thing you do before the real feedback. It’s actually a distinct and important skill, and most managers do it wrong.
Generic positive feedback — “great job today,” “you handled that call well,” “keep it up” — is practically useless. It feels good for about ten seconds and then evaporates. The person doesn’t know what specifically they did well, so they can’t deliberately repeat it. The feedback has zero development value.
Specific positive feedback using the same SBI structure is a different thing entirely. “In the escalation call this afternoon, when the customer started to raise their voice, you lowered your own and asked a clarifying question rather than matching their energy. That changed the whole tone of the call and they ended it satisfied. That’s the de-escalation skill we’ve been working on — it worked exactly as intended.” That’s feedback the person can take something from. They know what they did, they know why it worked, and they’re more likely to do it deliberately next time because it’s been named and connected to a positive outcome.
Just as expectations need to be specific to be useful, positive reinforcement needs to be specific to drive behaviour. The habit of precise, timely positive feedback is also one of the fastest ways to build trust with a new team — because it signals that you’re paying attention to what they’re actually doing, not just waiting to catch them when something goes wrong.
The development conversation is different from the feedback conversation.
There’s a distinction worth drawing clearly: feedback is about specific past behaviour. Development is about future capability and growth trajectory. They’re related, but they’re not the same conversation, and they shouldn’t be treated as the same conversation.
Feedback says: “Here’s what happened, here’s the impact, here’s the expectation going forward.” It’s corrective or reinforcing. It lives in the one-on-one or in a brief direct exchange. It’s frequent and specific.
Development says: “Here’s where I think you’re headed, here’s what I see in you, here are the gaps between where you are and where you want to go, and here’s what we’re going to work on together.” It’s forward-looking. It lives in a dedicated conversation that has space for reflection, not in the ten minutes before the queue opens.
New managers often collapse these into the same conversation, which muddies both. The person leaves unclear about whether the meeting was about something they did wrong or about their future. Keep them separate. Feedback is regular and specific. Development is deliberate and forward-looking. Both are necessary. Neither substitutes for the other.
The managers who are genuinely good at feedback are not naturally more comfortable with difficult conversations than the rest of us. They’ve just built a practice — a structure that removes some of the ambiguity about what to say and in what order — and they’ve repeated it enough times that it feels like second nature.
You get there by doing it badly a few times, noticing what didn’t land, and adjusting. The SBI structure gives you a scaffold. The discipline of timeliness keeps you from letting things accumulate. And the habit of giving specific positive feedback builds enough relational credit that the developmental conversations are received as investment rather than criticism.
That’s the whole thing. It’s not comfortable at first. It gets comfortable with repetition. Start this week.
Hutch Morzaria is a CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building and leading support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has held Director-level roles at Q4 Inc, AudienceView, Johnson Controls, and others, and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
