New Year, New Me: Embracing Growth Minded Feedback During 2025 Evaluations

How embracing a Culture of Growth during evaluations can help set the stage for a year of success, development, and peak performance.

Photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash

Happy New Year! For many people, the new year means an opportunity to reflect on the previous year, identify what they liked and can learn from the previous year, and to declare resolutions that will set them up for a successful coming year. If this sounds like you, then you’re already using your growth mindset, congrats!

For many organizations, the new year also means performance evaluation season. When I think about performance evaluation season, I think about an opportunity to celebrate accomplishments and set new goals. One thing I always share with clients is that performance evaluation season is also a great time to help the people you lead and support embrace their growth mindset. Utilizing the performance evaluation cycle as a way to set the tone for embracing a growth mindset and creating a Culture of Growth is ideal, because it comes around the same time every year and is filled with critical elements that are within your control as a culture creator. Plus, embracing a growth mindset enables you to celebrate successes, identify areas for growth, and prepare for a year of peak performance knowing that you and your teams have the support and strategies you will need to succeed.

The first thing you can do to set up your review in a way that creates a Culture of Growth is to be aware of the Mindset Triggers that are present in the review. In my previous post about what leaders can do to create a Culture of Growth, I shared how important it is to be aware of your team’s Mindset Triggers. It’s also important to know that Mindset Triggers don’t exist in silos and very often performance reviews bring out a mixture of all four triggers. The presence of the Evaluative Situation trigger is obvious, but also consider how High Effort Situations, Critical Feedback, and the Success of Others might show up throughout the evaluation process.

Here are some questions you might consider when trying to identify which Mindset Triggers are at play:

• Did the person you’re reviewing take on new responsibilities in the last year?

• Were they successful or did they struggle with these new responsibilities?

• Are they going up for promotion? Are they likely to get it, or will others in their cohort be moving on to the next level?

• Will you have to deliver critical feedback about their performance in the previous year?

• How do they usually respond to critical feedback?

Knowing the answers to these questions and preparing yourself and those participating in the review will support you both in leaning into your growth mindsets throughout this process.

Now let’s assume that there is an element of critical feedback that needs to be delivered during the evaluation. This is a common element of Culture of Growth, because we are often looking for opportunities to learn and grow through our experiences. And as a person who has critical feedback as a Mindset Trigger, I often have to remind myself that just because the feedback is critical doesn’t mean that it is negative. Critical feedback is just an opportunity to shed light on opportunities for people to improve and grow. Here are a couple of tips for you as you prepare to deliver growth minded critical feedback:

• Make sure your feedback is specific and targeted about what people need to improve.

• Give actionable information and strategies on how people can improve, anticipate and overcome difficulties, and achieve the agreed upon goals.

• Focus on behaviors, choices, and processes that people can control, rather than on innate talents or skills (or external situations) that leave some people feeling powerless.

Keeping these principles in mind, will not only provide your reviewee with satisfying actionable feedback, but it will also help create accountability as you track progress on areas for growth throughout the year.

Remember, Cultures of Growth are high performing cultures and investing in growth minded individuals isn’t only an investment in them, but it’s also an investment in your teams and the organization. If you want to learn more about how to equip you and your teams with the tools to enable a Culture of Growth, reach out! My team and I would love to hear from you.