Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Nancy Lublin featured by LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

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This past week, we learned that DoSomething.org is the 15th Best Place to Work in New York, according to Crain’s. And, earlier this year, we were ranked the 3rd best Not-For-Profit to work at in America by the NonProfit Times. These ranking are based on our policies and blind surveys of our people. Even without appearing on these nice little lists, I think we all feel pretty good about our office culture and are excited to be here.

Being a nice place doesn’t mean we avoid the tough stuff.

We are also a place that speaks often about work performance. We give and receive a lot of feedback here.

Giving Criticism

[Here are three of five]

1. SBI feedback. This system was introduced to us by the amazing Sal Giambanco. He built the team at PayPal and Ebay and now runs human capital for Omidyar and their portfolio.

Instead of saying, “Wow. Writing memos is a real weakness for you.” His “SBI” system suggests your feedback contain three parts:

o Situation: That memo you wrote yesterday…

o Behaviour: had lots of typos in it, was too long for someone to be able to really swallow the purpose, and it had no clear next steps…

o Impact: and so the team is a bit confused about how to move forward.

2. Feedback in all directions. We often think of managing down. We find that managing sideways and up also matters. SBI feedback is something your manager needs to hear too. And so does that guy sitting in the next cubicle who speaks too loudly on his mobile phone. Sighing loudly or reporting him to manager won’t be as effective as giving him some SBI feedback yourself. When you were yelling at your nanny on the phone this morning, I was on a conference call and your voice was loud enough that they could hear you too.

3. Positive to negative feedback ratio. Feedback isn’t always negative. In fact, we suggest you should be giving 6-8 positive compliments for every 1 negative. Again, those positive notes should be SBI-ish in format too.

[She then offers two more about giving feedback and five about Receiving Criticism.]

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Nancy Lublin is CEO and Chief Old Person at DoSomething.org, where she harnesses the extraordinary energy of teens and focuses it on issues they care passionately about.