Stica

Team Plan · example

Your plan:
managers giving feedback that lands

here's what we found

Prepared for People team, an example organisation

Organisation An example organisation

Date 10 June 2026

How it was made Drafted with AI, then written and checked line by line by Ian Pattison

Illustrative example Stica · stica.co.uk

01 Your brief, played back

Before any plan, the brief. What follows traces back to what you told us. If anything here reads differently from what you intended, that is the most important thing to correct before anything else is built.

The change

New team leaders give feedback that is specific enough for the other person to act on. They move away from verdict-based feedback ("you need to be more proactive") towards observation-based feedback that names what they saw, in what context, and what it affected.

Who it is for

New team leaders, typically 0 to 18 months into their first people-management role.

Setting

Remote-first organisation. Self-directed learning, no classroom time. Managers have roughly 15 to 20 minutes available for a module, and shorter windows for follow-up prompts.

How you would know it worked

Managers report feeling more confident going into feedback conversations.
The people team observes fewer "that feedback landed badly" escalations in the first six months of a new leader's tenure.
In a short check-in four weeks in, managers can describe a real feedback conversation they have had differently.

Everything in this document is built from these four elements. Any change to the brief changes the plan. The full programme starts by agreeing the brief in detail before any content is written.

02 The plan on a page

Five moves, across six weeks. Each one has a job. The order is not negotiable: you cannot practise something people have not yet been taught, and reminders without prior teaching are noise.

Move 1

Tell people

Week 1

Move 2

Teach it

Week 1

Move 3

Practise it

Weeks 1 to 2

Move 4

Remind it

Weeks 2 to 5

Move 5

Check it

Week 6

Move 2 is highlighted because this is where the sample content shown later in this document sits. Moves 1, 3, 4 and 5 are planned in full below; the content for those moves is built in the commissioned programme.

What each move does

Move 1: Tell

A short communication to managers before the module goes live. Sets expectations, explains why the programme exists, and tells them what they will be asked to do. Without this, people encounter the learning cold and engagement drops.

Move 2: Teach

The core module: the observation-interpretation distinction and the SBI (Situation, Behaviour, Impact) structure. Built with worked examples, embedded practice prompts, and a near-transfer task using their own real context.

Move 3: Practise

Application tasks built into the module and spaced over the first two weeks. The near-transfer task from the module asks them to draft real feedback they owe someone. The far-transfer task asks them to apply the same structure upward.

Move 4: Remind

Three prompts timed to when people typically forget: day 2 (when detail blurs), day 7 (when the week has moved on), and day 29 (when a real conversation has come up again). Full prompts in section 5.

Move 5: Check

A short check-in at six weeks, mapped to the success measures from the brief. What changed, what did not, and what to adjust. Not a survey for its own sake: each question links to a measure the brief named.

03 Communication: what gets said, where, and when

What

Why this programme exists and what the manager gets from it. What they will be asked to do, and roughly how long each thing takes. Who to contact with questions. No corporate launch framing; this goes to people who are new to managing and often uncertain about it.

Where

Email from the people team, timed to arrive the day before the module opens. A follow-up message at day 7 when the first practice prompt lands.

When

Day before launch (awareness); day of launch (module link); day 7 (first prompt, with a reminder of why it is arriving now).

Drafted example: launch email

Subject: Something short, before you read anything else this week

You have probably already had at least one feedback conversation that did not go the way you expected. Most first-time managers do, and most of them spend days afterwards wondering what went wrong.

We have put together a short module on the one thing that causes the majority of those conversations to go sideways. It is not a style issue, and it is not about being tougher or kinder. It is a structural habit that is easy to fix once you can see it.

The module takes around fifteen minutes. It will ask you to try one thing for real before you log off, because reading about feedback and doing it are different activities.

You will get a short prompt from us at day 2, day 7 and day 29. Each one asks you something specific. The timing is deliberate: these are the points at which the learning typically starts to blur, and a short question is enough to keep it.

The link is below. We recommend reading it when you have fifteen uninterrupted minutes, not in a gap between meetings.

[Link to module]

Reply to this email with any questions.

04 Learning content

Module outline: giving effective feedback

Calibration: two quick questions to route the learner to the right depth for their situation.
Hook: a scenario that opens the specific gap the module closes.
Core teaching: the observation-interpretation distinction and the SBI structure, with worked examples.
Embedded practice: two retrieval prompts woven into the teaching, with process-level guidance, not answer reveals.
Application: a near-transfer task (real feedback they owe someone) and a far-transfer task (applying SBI upward or across).

The hook and one teaching chunk are shown in full below. In a commissioned build, every section follows this architecture. The retrieval prompts shown in the teaching chunk are a designed-in learning event: the effort of recalling is what moves the idea from recognition to something the learner can use in a real conversation.

Sample: Hook (verbatim from the verified module)

You said it carefully. You meant it kindly. You described a problem you'd been sitting on for two weeks, and the person listened politely, and then nothing changed.

If that sounds familiar, the issue is almost certainly not what you said. It's the shape of what you said. Most feedback that fails doesn't fail because the message was wrong. It fails because it was a verdict delivered as if it were information, and verdicts give people nothing to act on.

By the end of this module, you'll be able to catch that slip in your own words before a feedback conversation at work goes wrong. Whether you're talking to a direct report, a peer, or someone you manage indirectly, you'll have a structure that gives the other person something specific enough to act on.

Sample: Teaching chunk: the slip everyone makes (verbatim, lightly abridged)

The most common reason feedback misses the mark is a single step that gets skipped. People move straight from what they saw to what they concluded, and deliver the conclusion as though it were a fact.

Compare these two:

"You're not really a team player."
"In the last two weekly standups you gave your update and then went on mute for the rest of the call. The team usually uses those 10 minutes to spot clashes early, and we missed two this week because we didn't get your input."

Both statements might be pointing at the same underlying concern. But only the second gives the other person something to work with. The technical name for the difference is observation versus interpretation. An observation is something two people watching the same event would both agree they saw. An interpretation is your meaning-making about it.

A quick test. Before you deliver a piece of feedback, ask: could a recording device have captured it? A recording captures behaviour. It cannot capture character, effort, or attitude. If your statement is something a recording could have caught, it's probably an observation. If not, you're in interpretation territory.

Try it: embedded retrieval prompt (verbatim from the verified module)

Here's a piece of feedback: "Alex needs to be more proactive."

Rewrite it as an observation-based statement. Use the camera test. Name a plausible specific situation and the specific behaviour you might have observed in that situation.

(Write your version before you read the guidance below.)

05 Reminders and practice

Reading a module once does not change a habit. The prompts below are timed to when people typically forget: two days after the learning, when the detail starts to blur; seven days in, when the week has moved on; and twenty-nine days later, when the situation has come up again in real life. The evidence behind this spacing comes from a meta-analysis covering over 21,000 learners. Delivering these prompts at the right intervals is the job of the full programme.

Day 2 (verbatim from the verified module)

Catch yourself giving one piece of feedback in the next two days, or receiving one. After the conversation, ask: was it observation-based or interpretation-based? If it was an interpretation, what would the observation version have looked like? Write two sentences.

Day 7 (verbatim from the verified module)

Without looking back at the module: what is the difference between an observation and an interpretation? Write a one-paragraph explanation from memory. Then write one complete SBI statement from a real situation this week.

If you can do both from memory, the idea has made it past recognition into something you can use.

Day 29 (verbatim from the verified module)

Think of a feedback conversation you've had since you read this module. It could be one you gave or one you received.

Did the conversation go differently? Write two or three sentences on what you did or noticed, and what the response was.

If nothing changed, that's useful information too. What got in the way: the situation, the other person's reaction, or your own hesitation? That's the real edge to work on next.

Delivery channels: Email, Slack, or your own LMS. The timing and content are fixed in the plan; only the channel changes. In a commissioned build, the prompts go out automatically at the agreed times.

06 Measures

Each success measure from the brief is mapped below to a point in the programme and a way of checking it. We do not promise outcomes. What we design is the check: if behaviour changed, this is how you would see it.

Success measure	When checked	How
Managers report feeling more confident going into feedback conversations.	Week 6 check-in	A single open question in the day-29 prompt: "Think of a feedback conversation you've had since the module. Did it go differently?" Responses reviewed by the people team; no score, no survey fatigue.
Fewer "that feedback landed badly" escalations in the first six months of a new leader's tenure.	Six months post-programme	Compare the people team's own record of escalations for this cohort against the equivalent period for the previous cohort. No external tool needed.
At the week-4 check-in, managers can describe a real feedback conversation they have had differently.	Week 4 (day 29 prompt)	The day-29 prompt asks for a two-to-three-sentence account of a real conversation. The people team reads the responses. A useful answer names a specific situation. A non-answer ("nothing has come up yet") is also informative and tells you where to follow up.

In the full programme, this table becomes the review agenda at the agreed check-in point. What gets measured gets adjusted. None of these measures requires a tool you do not already have.

07 Gaps we found

An honest account of what the brief revealed is missing or at risk. These are not criticisms of what the organisation is doing now. They are the places where, in our experience, this type of programme most often falls short.

Gap 1 Nobody hears about this twice. A single communication before launch is better than nothing, but a new manager who does not open the email on the day it arrives may not know the module exists until someone mentions it. The plan includes a day-7 follow-up, which helps. Without a second channel (Slack, a team meeting mention), some managers will fall through.
Gap 2 No practice between module and first real conversation. The module includes application tasks. But a manager who completes the module on a Friday and has no feedback conversation until the following week will have lost the edge of it before they get to use it. The brief does not mention any peer-practice or roleplay opportunity. That gap may matter more than any amount of well-designed content.
Gap 3 this is the one to close first The success measures are qualitative. That is fine, and it is honest. But the escalation measure depends on the people team keeping a record of escalations linked to specific managers and time periods. If that record does not already exist, it needs to be set up before the programme launches, not after.

08 Ideas worth testing

Two suggestions that came out of reading the brief. Neither is in the plan above; both are things a full programme could add if the brief were expanded.

Idea 1: A pre-module observation prompt Before the module opens, send managers one question: "Think of a feedback conversation you gave in the last month. How did the other person respond?" No right answer required. The act of recalling a specific moment before learning about feedback primes the module content and activates what they already know. Takes thirty seconds to send; the evidence for its benefit is strong (pre-test questions improve later learning).
Idea 2: A peer pair at day 14 Match each manager in the cohort with one other, and ask them to share a real feedback conversation they had in the past two weeks. Not a roleplay; just a five-minute conversation about what happened and what they would do differently with the SBI structure in hand. Peer-to-peer application tasks at a realistic interval produce better transfer than individual reflection alone, and in a remote-first team this is achievable in a calendar slot that already exists.

09 What the full programme adds

This document is the strategy: the plan, the gaps, the measures, and one module shown in full. The full programme is what runs it.

Build

All communication, learning and reminder content built from an agreed brief, checked against it, and ready to deliver. Two audience paths per module where the brief warrants it. In this case, that means a novice path (shown in the sample above) and a practitioner path for managers who have been giving feedback for longer and need less scaffolding and more challenge.

Run

Prompts and reminders delivered at the right intervals, in whatever channel fits the team: email, Slack, your own systems. Nothing requires managers to remember to come back.

Measure

A check-in at six weeks, against the three measures from this brief. What changed, what did not, and what to adjust. No invented metrics; no vanity numbers.

10 Pricing

What it costs

A Team Plan is £295, one payment. That buys the diagnosis, the strategy and the first piece of content built, back within five working days of us confirming your brief. One rebuild is included if it misses your brief, and if your brief is not something a Team Plan can do, the £295 comes back in full. If you would rather see the work before you pay for anything, Stica Craft builds you one piece free, carrying our branding.

Building with our first clients. Stica is new, and we are building with the people who use it rather than in isolation. In return for being early we ask for fifteen minutes of honest feedback on three things: the brand, the process, and whether the output was useful. That is the exchange.

Next step

There is no call to book first. If this plan looks right, start a Team Plan and send your brief in the same move, and the five working days begin the moment we confirm it. If something in the plan looks off, say so first: the brief is the most important part, and getting it right costs nothing.

stica.co.uk

Your plan:managers giving feedback that lands

What each move does

Module outline: giving effective feedback

Your plan:
managers giving feedback that lands