9 Box Grid: A Practitioner’s Guide [FREE Template]
The 9 box grid is a well-known tool for talent management and succession planning. In this practical guide, we will explain how categorization in the 9 box grid works, the talent management action steps per category, and provide an Excel template for quick reporting. Let’s dive in!
Contents
What is the 9 box grid?
Advantages of the 9 box grid
Creating a 9 box grid
The 9 box grid explained
Applying the 9 box grid in talent management
9 box grid for succession planning
9 box grid Excel template and guide
Critique of the 9 box grid
FAQ
What is the 9 box grid?
The 9 box grid is a well-known talent management tool in which employees are segmented into nine groups based on two dimensions – performance and potential. The purpose of this matrix is to closely align talent management and development initiatives to where they add the most value.
When making talent management decisions, it is important to consider two things, which will impact the organization’s success. First, how well the employees perform today – their performance – and second, how well they are likely to perform in the future – their growth potential – in line with what the organization wants to achieve.
For example, employees who do well in their roles but have little growth potential are likely to consistently contribute within their positions. High-performing employees who have great potential are expected to take on more complex roles in the future or be potential successors.
However, low-performing employees with low potential will require a lot of management attention and are unlikely to move into succession pipelines. These different segments of employees require different talent management approaches.
Advantages of the 9 box grid
The 9 box grid is a very popular tool, and for good reason. It offers organizations significant benefits, such as:
- Being simple and easy to use to make decisions: The 9 box grid model is an established tool with a fairly simple and straightforward structure. During your employee review, all you need to do is match them to the right box based on their performance and potential. The way the grid is visualized makes it easy to catch on, even for those completely new to this tool.
- Helping identify valuable talent: The 9 box grid allows you to spot high performers in your organization with great potential and identify what they need to improve to develop further. You’ll have the data to back up your decision of where and how to direct resources to engage and develop these employees. Additionally, when internal promotions come up, you’ll know exactly who to offer these opportunities to.
- A holistic approach to reviewing talent: This tool provides you with a more well-rounded approach to performance management. You won’t get sucked into a single element of an employee’s performance, and you will be able to assess both current performance and future potential.
- A versatile tool: The 9 box talent grid is useful not only for talent management but also workforce planning. This tool gives you a good overview of the potential of your employees and in which position they might thrive in the future. In other words, it makes succession planning easier. You can also use the 9 box grid to identify employees with leadership potential and move them onto management tracks.
One of the most critical things to get right in talent management is prioritizing talent management efforts to where they will make the biggest impact. Using a tool like the 9 box grid can be immensely helpful to understand the internal talent landscape and make investment decisions.
Of course, the 9 box grid is not a tool without its faults. Later on in this article, we’ll take a closer look at the disadvantages of the 9 box grid.
Creating a 9 box grid
Creating a 9 box grid involves three steps: evaluating performance, evaluating potential, and bringing the two dimensions together.
Step 1: Evaluating performance
The nine-box consists of three performance categories: low, moderate, and high. During their performance appraisal, employees are usually evaluated on this (or a similar) performance scale.
There are many ways to evaluate performance, and each organization uses different methods. As an example, we propose the following approach, regardless of the scale that you use:
- Low performance: The employee does not match the requirements of their job and fails their individual targets.
- Moderate performance: The employee partially matches the requirements of their job and their individual targets.
- High performance: The employee fully meets the requirements of their job and their individual targets.
The advantage of this approach is that it uses the objective job requirements as defined in the organization’s job structure as performance criteria. Some organizations may have less defined job structures and work more with personal targets. In that case, you can put more emphasis on assessing individual target achievement.
Step 2: Evaluating potential
The other axis of the 9 box grid considers individual potential. Potential should also be evaluated during the talent review process and often falls into the following categories.
- Low potential | Working at full potential: The employee is working at full potential and is not expected to improve, either because they are at maximum capacity or because of a lack of motivation.
- Moderate potential | Develop in the current role: The employee has the potential to further develop within their current role. This can be in terms of performance but also in terms of expertise.
- High potential | Ready for movement: The employee performs well beyond the expectations of their current position and responsibilities. They are likely ready to take on roles and responsibilities with more complexity.
Communicating your evaluation of potential has to be based on objective data. Through this process, you want employees to have a growth mindset and associate extra effort with improvements in performance. As such, communicating this requires some tact. For this reason, some companies decide not to communicate this potential score to employees.
Similarly, you should also be careful about telling employees they are eligible for a promotion. There may not be any job openings available at the moment to fulfill this.
Step 3. Bringing it together
The next step is to plot performance and potential on a 3×3 grid, resulting in the 9 box grid. The brilliance of this grid is that for each box in the grid, organizations can use different talent management techniques.
Segmenting and categorizing talent is not about placing people in boxes. Instead, it is about thinking what talent the organization will require in the future and ensuring a ready talent supply through targeted development and other initiatives.
9 box grid explained
Let’s go over the different categories in the 9 box grid and look at how the talent management approaches will differ per each segment.
Underperformers
In the bottom left corner of the 9 box grid, there are the employees who score low on performance and low on potential. There are different names for them, which include talent risk, bad hire, underperformer, and iceberg. Some companies even go as far as labeling them as ‘useless workers’ who need to be ‘fired immediately’.
Put simply, your talent management efforts should focus on employees with greater potential for growth and contribution rather than on these underperformers. This strategic approach ensures high work quality across the team and prevents situations where team members compensate for others’ underperformance.
Ideally, the organization should actively seek more suitable roles for these individuals, aligning their skills with the organization’s needs and their career growth.
Action plan
- Identify personal roadblocks that may cause low performance and lack of growth. However, be careful not to over-invest and know when to move them out or sever ties. Sit with the individual to see if there is a more appropriate assignment where they (and you) can utilize their skills better.
- If the first two options don’t bring quick wins, you should create an exit plan together where you help the person find a role that better suits their skills outside of your organization.
If these underperformers are a common phenomenon in your organization, review your talent acquisition and your selection process.
Up or out
The next category in the 9 box grid is the up or out category. It includes the medium performers with low potentials (effective performers) and the medium potentials with low performance (dilemmas).
The effective performers or specialists are medium performers, but they do a good enough job. This makes them a challenging group. Investing time and money in training them will likely not pay off. The best approach is to create a performance improvement plan. With the creation of this plan, you help them understand where their points of improvement are, and you give them the opportunity to work on them.
If this is not paying off and they are not moving into the high-performance group, you will have to make a difficult decision, hence: up or out.
The dilemmas or inconsistent performers have some potential to be great, but they are not performing. Here, the question is why they are not performing. You need to go through the same process as before and try to identify what causes their average performance. Are they new hires, and did they have a poor onboarding experience, or maybe they don’t understand what you expect from them
As an intervention, you can enroll them in peer coaching or other mentorship programs. If this is not working and they are not progressing into a higher performance category, you will have to make a difficult decision.
Action plan
- Create a performance improvement plan by going over personal roadblocks and skills required for the role that the employee needs to work on. Provide measurable expectations and clearly define what good performance will look like. The employee should clearly know what is expected of them.
- Check in every month and evaluate progress on the plan. Always document these meetings well, as this will help you make a better decision. The employee will also benefit from a structured plan and feedback.
- If performance does not improve within six months to a year, you should create an exit plan together where you help the person find a role that better suits their needs outside of your organization.
Untapped talent and trusted professionals
In the bottom right corner and top left corner, we find people who excel in only one element of the 9 box grid.
The trusted professionals score high in performance but low in growth potential. They are the ones who you should take care of in your organization. They perform well and have a good work mentality.
However, they likely don’t have much potential for growth. This means that you should keep them engaged and reward them for their contribution. However, be careful of over-rewarding these employees to the extent that they have limited ambition and opportunity for movement and growth.
Action plan
- Ensure that these employees are motivated and engaged to make a meaningful contribution.
- Analyze how their work will change in the future and help them prepare as far as possible.
- Raise salaries nominally but be careful with substantial raises and bonuses. Do not promote beyond their potential.
The untapped talent, also referred to as enigmas or rough diamonds, are on the other end of the spectrum. They score high in potential but low in performance. An example could be a management trainee from a prestigious university. They haven’t learned the ropes yet, but they are eager to learn. Here it is key to continuously track their performance – they should grow and increase their performance rapidly.
Action plan
- Give these employees time to develop but monitor their performance. You are not only looking for improvements but for stable, solid performance. Keep in mind that it is easy to improve if performance is bad; if they are high in potential, they should be able to perform at a medium to high level within six to twelve months.
- Communicate clear expectations for their current role so they know what is expected of them.
- Communicate that you believe in their potential but also that they should improve their current performance.
- If they still score low in performance a year onward, you should create an exit plan together where you help the person find a role that better suits their skills outside of your organization.
Future stars
We labeled the next three 9 box grid segments as ‘future stars’. They already make up the core of your workforce while also having the potential to grow into more advanced roles.
Your high potentials or emerging contributors show high potential but are average on performance. Oftentimes, this is because they haven’t had time to fully grow in the role yet. The priority here is to move them to the right position in the 9 box grid, so they are in the top-right corner. The approach and action plan are similar to your reliable team players.
Your reliable team players are consistent performers who also have the potential to grow further in their current roles. Your main priority is to bring these people to the right of the 9 box grid, where they score high on performance. The steps here are similar to those for your high potentials.
Action steps
- Ensure that expectations and role requirements are clear.
- Give employees who are new in their roles the time to develop their performance to the highest level.
- Consistently praise accomplishments, good performance, and initiatives that help to advance organizational goals. Also, monitor their performance and have regular sit-downs to ensure that they are still happy in their role.
- Expose them to short-term job rotation schemes to expose them to other experiences that will help them perform better or job enlargement by adding activities that fit the employee.
- Enable them with peer coaching by a high-performing employee or professional coaching to solve any personal or professional issues that hold the person back. In other words, help them overcome performance barriers.
- Provide these professionals with classroom training and on-the-job learning opportunities that help them develop the skills that they are good at or bring skills that hold them back to a higher level.
Strong contributors are already contributing to your organization so the key strategy here is to keep them meaningfully engaged while ensuring that they will be up for the job not just now but also for years to come. If the strong contributor is ambitious and looking to move upward in the organization, you will want to improve their potential with different interventions.
Action steps
- Keep high performers happy and engaged. Regularly check in with them and appreciate the work they do.
- Not everyone needs to be a star. If your high performer is happy in their current role and does not want a promotion or extra responsibility, that is also a great outcome. It is not feasible to promote the entire organization every few years, so this may be a preferred option.
- Give them time to grow. If someone is not yet at full potential, it may mean that they need to grow more into their current role before they can move on to the next.
- Leverage techniques like job rotation and give them challenging assignments to expose them to different parts of the business. This will build their business acumen and prepare them for a broader leadership role.
- Find them a mentor who can help them grow and fulfill their ambition and provide training (and upskilling) opportunities.
Exceptional talent
The exceptional talent, also referred to as future leaders, are your high performers who are also capable of taking on new roles. These are your A-players and most valuable employees. They also play a critical role in succession management.
Action plan
- Give your stars challenging assignments – they are the most likely of all your employees to pull it off. Examples are important internal projects, turnaround projects, or more external opportunities in start-ups or spin-off companies.
- Check in with them regularly and assess if they are still happy in their current role. Ensure that you spot early signs of dissatisfaction. Praise them lavishly and ensure that they feel appreciated for the contributions they make to the company.
- Provide mentorship with more senior members of the organization
- Create networking opportunities with other stars and with senior members of the organization. These opportunities help to build a network between your top performers and your senior leadership.
- If they are interested in it, roles in external boards and committees could incentivize them, raise their public profile, and provide an interesting challenge and networking opportunity for them.
- Reward them and ensure that they receive competitive compensation. These employees contribute the most to your organization, and you should reward them accordingly.
Applying the 9 box grid in talent management
One of the key advantages of the 9 box grid is that it makes talent investment decisions easier.
Select International, an employee screening company, offers an interesting perspective. They propose that your total talent management and development budget should be allocated based on one’s position in the 9 box talent matrix.
If you had to invest $100, you should divide it among the different talent categories, as shown in the figure above. Underperformers who occupy the left bottom corner should be invested in the least, while the exceptional talent in the right top corner should get the most resources.
This also makes sense from a resource allocation and strategic perspective – as a business you will want to invest in the (human) resources that provide the largest return and that create the biggest competitive advantage. Investing in underperformers would take away resources from good and top performers.
This does mean that not everyone is equal – a message that not all HR professionals appreciate. It’s important to accept that some people fit an organization’s culture better than others, and not everyone is equally suited for the same role.
9 box grid for succession planning
In a similar vein, organizations use the 9 box grid for succession planning as well. Succession planning should focus on your stars, who score high in performance and high in potential. These are the employees who will build the future of your organization.
The 9 box grid is a tool that helps in the identification of leadership talent. You can then develop these potential leaders for more senior leadership positions through leadership development, (performance) coaching, mentoring, regular 360-degree feedback, and other feedback methods.
The stars are the key employees in the succession matrix, where critical roles are mapped, and different top employees are mapped in terms of their suitability for a role. When these roles become vacant, it means that there is talent ready to fill these newly opened roles.
Good talent management practices are underpinned by data. Data provides objectivity and insights, eliminating inevitable biases that exist when we make decisions about talent. Establishing data collection mechanisms as part of talent management is a critical foundational practice to put in place.
9 box grid Excel template and guide
Beside a dedicated HR performance management software, Excel is a great tool to segment your employees based on their performance and potential. You can get a quick overview of the talent segments within your organization, enabling you to make informed talent decisions.
This 9 box grid Excel template helps you visualize which employees belong to which of the nine talent segments. You simply fill in employee names and their performance and potential levels, and they will automatically be sorted into the right talent segment.
Critique of the 9 box grid
Although the 9 box grid provides a clear way of managing talent and performance, it is not undisputed.
Its biggest shortcoming is arguably its connection to traditional performance management, characterized by a once-a-year, subjective rating by one’s manager. Many companies, including Accenture and Deloitte, have moved away from annual performance reviews, opting for continuous feedback instead. This provides more opportunities to improve performance as well as more data points to accurately assess performance.
We highly recommend measuring performance using as many objective data points as possible. Continuous feedback loops, as well as goal-setting systems such as SMART goals or objectives and key results (OKRs), can serve a purpose here.
Additionally, transparency is key. Without clear communication about talent management practices, it can miss its goal and may result in a “rank and yank” system where employees are ranked against each other and the lowest end of the ranking being terminated (the yank).
This is not the intention of the 9 box grid. Instead, the 9 box grid should be leveraged to develop and cultivate talent and, through talent, build a sustainable competitive advantage for the organization.
Wrap up
The 9 box grid can be a useful tool to manage employees with different levels of performance and potential in your organization. As such, organizations can use it for performance management, talent management, and succession planning.
Keep in mind that the true value of the 9 box grid is not about putting your employees into certain labels. Rather, it is during the evaluation process and the discussions that you have afterward that will give you the opportunity to consider employees’ successes and ensure that your organization invests in the right development strategies. As such, make sure to communicate clearly about the talent and performance management practices that you employ during the process.
FAQ
The 9 box grid is a well-known talent management tool in which employees are segmented into nine groups, based on their performance and potential.
To create a 9 box grid, you go through three steps: evaluating performance, evaluating potential, and bringing those two together.
The 9 box grid can, for instance, be used as a basis for talent management (i.e. talent investment decisions) and succession planning.
After you’ve finished evaluating the performance and the potential of your employees and bringing them together, you can now map your employees onto the grid. Match them with the box that would fit their profile most. You can then use the result of your 9 box assessment to implement specific coaching, development, and talent management strategies for different groups of employees.
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