PromptWork

Draft difficult feedback using situation-behaviour-impact

Turn a hard observation into feedback structured as situation, behaviour, impact and a request — so it reads as specific and fair, not as a verdict.

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Your prompt

Help me draft difficult feedback for a senior teammate, Marcus about interrupting others in team meetings. Use the situation-behaviour-impact structure: describe the specific situation (when/where), the observable behaviour (what was actually said or done, not a character judgment), the impact it had (on the work, the team, or others — stated plainly, not exaggerated), and end with a specific request for what to do differently going forward. Do not use labels like "unprofessional" or "lazy" — describe the behaviour instead of naming a trait. If the details I gave you are too thin to describe a specific situation or behaviour, tell me what's missing instead of writing something generic. What happened: in the last three planning meetings, Marcus has cut off two junior engineers mid-sentence to jump to his own point. one of them mentioned to me afterward that she's started holding back ideas. Marcus is a strong technical contributor and probably doesn't realize he's doing it.

Model-agnostic — works in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any AI chat.

Why this prompt works

  • Naming the situation-behaviour-impact structure explicitly, rather than just saying "give feedback," is what keeps the output anchored to one incident instead of drifting into a general character assessment.
  • Banning trait labels like "unprofessional" and requiring observable behaviour instead is the single change that most reliably keeps difficult feedback fair and defensible rather than accusatory.
  • Ending on a specific request rather than a verdict reframes the message as forward-looking, and the instruction to flag thin input rather than generalize stops the model from inventing a pattern from a single data point.

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