Principles

Principles are the foundation of Mistvine's feedback system. They define what behaviors, values, and competencies matter at each level of your organization - turning vague expectations into specific, actionable standards.

What Are Principles?

Think of principles as the "what to evaluate" in your feedback process. Instead of asking "How is Sarah doing?" you ask "How well does Sarah demonstrate technical excellence?" or "Does Sarah support team goals?"

Each principle is a clear statement of expected behavior:

• "Demonstrates leadership and accountability"
• "Communicates effectively with stakeholders"
• "Takes ownership of tasks and sees them through"

When giving feedback, reviewers rate each applicable principle on a 1-5 scale, optionally adding comments. This creates structured, consistent feedback across your organization.

Principle Levels

Principles exist at four levels, each serving a different purpose:

Level	Scope	Created By	Applies To
Organization	Company-wide	HR/Admin	All employees
Practice	Functional group	Practice leads	Practice members
Team	Specific team	Team leads	Team members
Individual	Personal growth	Each employee	Themselves

Organization Principles

These are your company values translated into observable behaviors. Everyone in the organization is evaluated against these principles, creating a shared language for performance.

Example principles:

• Promotes collaboration across teams
• Champions company values in daily work
• Maintains high ethical standards

Best for: Core values, cultural expectations, universal competencies.

Practice Principles

Practices are functional disciplines - Engineering, Sales, Design, etc. Practice principles capture what excellence looks like within that discipline.

Example for Engineering:

• Demonstrates technical excellence
• Contributes to knowledge sharing
• Stays current with industry best practices

Best for: Functional skills, craft standards, discipline-specific behaviors.

Team Principles

Teams can define principles specific to their context, goals, or working style. These complement (not replace) organization and practice principles.

Example for a Product Team:

• Ships iteratively with customer feedback
• Balances speed with quality
• Documents decisions and trade-offs

Best for: Team norms, project-specific expectations, collaborative behaviors.

Individual Principles

Each employee can choose up to 5 personal principles — the behaviors they want feedback on for their own growth.

Example individual principles:

• Develops presentation skills for senior stakeholders
• Builds deeper technical expertise in system architecture
• Improves cross-functional collaboration

Best for: Personal development goals, self-identified growth areas, skills the employee wants to strengthen.

How Principles Apply to Feedback

When you give feedback to someone, Mistvine automatically determines which principles apply based on:

1. Organization principles - Always included
2. Practice principles - If the receiver belongs to that practice
3. Team principles - If the receiver is on that team
4. Individual principles - The receiver's own self-selected principles

This means feedback is contextual. Rating an engineer includes engineering practice principles; rating a sales rep includes sales principles. The system handles the complexity so reviewers see only relevant principles.

Creating Principles

Who Can Create What

Role	Can Create
Org Admin	Organization principles
Practice Lead	Practice principles
Team Lead	Team principles
Each Employee	Their own individual principles (up to 5)

Limits

Each level has a maximum number of principles to prevent evaluation fatigue:

• Organization: 10 principles
• Practice: 10 principles
• Team: 10 principles
• Individual: 5 principles per person

Why limits? Research shows that more than 5-10 evaluation criteria leads to cognitive overload and less thoughtful ratings. Quality over quantity.

Default Principles

When setting up a new organization or team, Mistvine offers curated default principles you can copy and customize:

Organization defaults include:

• Demonstrates leadership and accountability
• Promotes collaboration across teams
• Drives innovation and continuous improvement

Team defaults include:

• Meets commitments and deadlines
• Communicates effectively
• Takes ownership of tasks

You're not required to use defaults - they're starting points that most organizations find useful.

Rating Principles

During feedback, each principle is rated on a 5-point scale:

Score	Meaning
1	Rarely demonstrates
2	Sometimes demonstrates
3	Usually demonstrates
4	Consistently demonstrates
5	Exemplifies and models for others

Comments are optional but encouraged, especially for scores at the extremes (1-2 or 5). Specific examples make feedback actionable.

Weekly Feedback Cycles

Principles integrate with Mistvine's weekly feedback cycles:

1. Each week, team members are expected to give feedback on their peers
2. The system tracks how many principle ratings were expected vs. given
3. Compliance percentage helps managers identify feedback gaps
4. Anonymous aggregation protects psychological safety

See the Waves documentation for how weekly sentiment differs from principle-based feedback.

Viewing Feedback on Principles

As a Receiver

You can see aggregated feedback on each principle over time. The feedback heatmap shows:

• Which principles you're strong in
• Which principles need attention
• Trends over weeks and months

Individual feedback comments are visible, but the identity of who gave specific ratings is protected.

As a Manager

People managers see:

• Aggregated principle scores for each direct report
• Which reports may need coaching on specific principles
• Feedback trends over time

Managers cannot see who gave specific ratings - this protects honest feedback.

Archiving Principles

Principles should evolve as your organization does. When a principle is no longer relevant:

1. Archive it rather than delete - this preserves historical feedback
2. Archived principles stop appearing in new feedback forms
3. Historical data remains accessible for reporting

Never delete principles with existing feedback - you'll lose valuable performance history.

Best Practices

Writing Good Principles

Good principles are:

• Observable - You can see the behavior in action
• Specific - Clear about what "good" looks like
• Actionable - The person can improve

Avoid:

• "Be a good team player" (too vague)
• "Never make mistakes" (not realistic)
• "Have a positive attitude" (hard to observe)

Better:

• "Offers help to teammates facing blockers"
• "Acknowledges errors and takes corrective action"
• "Contributes constructively in team discussions"

Number of Principles

• Start small - 3-5 principles per level is enough initially
• Add as needed - Better to expand than overwhelm
• Review quarterly - Are these still the right behaviors to reinforce?

Principle Ownership

• Organization principles should be owned by HR or leadership
• Practice principles should involve practice members in creation
• Team principles should be discussed as a team
• Individual principles are owned by each employee — they choose the behaviors they want to grow in

Transparency builds trust. People perform better when they know how they're being evaluated.

---

Next steps: Navigate to Settings > Principles to view and manage principles for your organization, practice, or team.