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Catch part 1 (A primer on unlocking greater talent reviews) and part 3 (How to effectively and efficiently conduct talent reviews in 2024) to unlock the most value from your talent reviews.
You’ve got a great talent pool of hard-working and dedicated people. Now it’s time to see how each team member has performed and whether some of them can take the helm in the future.
But how exactly do you go about doing that? Specifically, how do you plan to measure your team member's performance and potential while identifying their possible needs?
The answer is simple. Use a 9-box talent grid.
Created by McKinsey to identify key investment opportunities and compare different business units, the talent assessment grid has since become a staple in talent reviews and succession planning across the globe.
But what exactly is a 9-box talent grid? And, more importantly, how can we use it for reviewing our talent pool? Read on to unravel everything there is to know about these grids.
What is a 9-box talent grid?
The 9-box grid is a powerful tool to assess your people’s performance and potential, helping build a high-performance workplace culture.
The grid is a 3x3 matrix, each representing the nine categories that signify an individual's level of performance and potential. The horizontal axis measures performance, while the vertical axis measures potential. Each axis is divided by three labels - low, moderate, and high.
During an assessment, we can categorize our team members into one of the following boxes that define their present and future competencies.
Nowadays, though, the 9-box talent grid has gone far beyond simply being a tool for talent assessment. Organizations are getting creative with its application and use the grid to solve performance management-related problems such as:
- Succession Planning: The 9-box grid plays a crucial role in helping an organization’s leaders identify talent and groom them to take on leadership roles in the near future. It allows them to identify such talent’s future needs and prepare a development plan to facilitate the same.
- Performance Reviews: The 9-box grid can indicate an organization’s overall completion of OKRs for any particular review period from ground zero. Additionally, by identifying a team member's needs and future potential, the managers and executives can align their goals to achieve key results while fulfilling all requirements and facilitating any required training.
- Facilitating Dialogue: The 9-box grid allows for sharing multiple perspectives in talent evaluation. This helps provide more accurate results and facilitates dialogue among the organization’s managers in reaching a joint consensus on talent evaluation. Not to mention, the grid enables coaching conversations between managers and those in need of the same.
How can you use the 9-box grid for reviewing talent?
Now that we know what a 9-box grid is and what it represents, it’s time to fill one out for ourselves. To understand how to utilize a 9-box talent grid, we’ll divide the process into three parts:
- Part 1 -Assessing your talent: The process of using a 9-box grid begins with a general talent review process that compares a team member against pre-established criteria that measure both performance and potential. For performance, try to analyze qualities such as on-the-job performance, job awareness, adaptability, productivity, etc. (For more details, check out our article on how to conduct effective talent reviews in 2024). For potential, you can boil it down to past instances where they demonstrated leadership abilities, social skills, and drive. A scoring system with pre-defined psychometric parameters (a 5-point scale, for example) can help you evaluate your team members more easily.
- Part 2 - Placing team members on the grid: Now that you have successfully compared each team member against performance and potential competencies, it’s time to identify their actual placement on the 9-box grid. To do so, determine a range for labeling your team members under low, moderate, and high for both the performance and the potential axes. Once you do so, you’ll be able to place your team members in one of the nine boxes of the talent grid based on the score you assign to them.
- Part 3 - Identifying needs and preparing a development plan: Now that you know where each of your team members is placed on the grid, it is up to you to prepare an individual plan for each member based on what they need to excel and realize their potential.
In the case of team members placed on the lowest box of the grid—low performance and low potential- you must initiate a conversation to understand the missing key to the puzzle. Next, lay out a development plan to help your people improve their performance and align it with your key results.
In the case of succession planning, your primary objective is to build bench strength. To do so, you must identify your high-potential team members and prepare plans to transform them into leaders capable of taking charge within the organization.
Remember, every program will be different for every team member. For example:
- A team member with high potential but low performance may require stretch tasks that can effectively use their potential and improve performance.
- On the other hand, team members with high potential and moderate to high performance may require more leadership opportunities and coaching to bring out the leader in them.
Should the 9-box be the go-to model for measuring potential?
People want to know where they stand and what their future holds for them in this organization. A 9-box grid acts as a universal yardstick that can be used to communicate this information org-wide without ambiguity, while also yielding second-order benefits like fairness and inclusion.
So then, the next question is, should you use the 9-box as is, or should you customize it to your organization?
Essentially, there are 2 levers to any talent grid:
- Dimensions that you plot on a grid
- Distinct buckets you want to sort people into
The 9-box grid simplifies these 2 things by plotting performance on goals against some proxy for potential, usually performance on org values and competencies. Usually, this looks like asking these two questions:
- What were they expected to do?
- How were they expected to do it?
To illustrate this via an example - If you are a large FMCG conglomerate, getting disrupted by smaller D2C brands in the market, you would want your teams to act with velocity. So, in your next talent review, on the 9 box, you configure the y-axis (usually gauging potential) to measure the velocity of performance, plotted against performance on goals on the x-axis.
Coming to the second bit about creating distinct buckets– the 9-box sorts people into the intuitive buckets of “fails to meet expectations,” “meets expectations,” and “surpasses expectations.” Some organizations might want to differentiate superstars from above-average performers, and hence, they create a 4th bucket of “superstars,” and in these cases, they end up with a 16 box because it works for their organization to create internal success stories.
In sum, your strategy will decide what framework you should use – take the 9-box as a starting point and then contextualize it to your own organization’s requirements.
Tips for using the 9-box grid effectively
1. Set clear criteria for performance and potential
One of the biggest challenges with the 9-box grid is its subjectivity. To overcome this, establish clear criteria for performance and potential based on competencies relevant to your organization. This will help ensure that all managers are on the same page and can provide more objective assessments of their team members.
2. Gather multiple perspectives
To get a more accurate assessment of your team members, gather perspectives from different managers and leaders. This can help reduce bias and ensure that everyone's input is considered when placing team members on the grid.
3. Don't rely solely on the grid
While the 9-box grid is a valuable tool for talent assessment, it should not be the only tool you use. It's essential to gather feedback from multiple sources, including team members themselves, to get a complete picture of their performance and potential.
4. Use the grid as a starting point
The 9-box grid is a great starting point for talent assessment, but it shouldn't be the end-all-be-all. Use it to identify potential high-performers and those needing development, and then use other tools and approaches to assess their skills and potential further.
5. Keep the conversation ongoing
Talent assessment should not be a one-time event. Keep the conversation ongoing with your team members and provide regular feedback to help them develop their skills and potential. This can help ensure they continue to grow and contribute to the organization's success.
Limitations of the 9-box talent grid
There’s no doubt that the 9-box talent grid is a great and handy tool for talent and performance management. However, it’s not devoid of flaws. Some of its limitations are:
1. Lack of complexity
One limitation of the 9-box grid is that it is a 2-dimensional system that lacks the complexity of multidimensional aspects of competencies. Competencies, such as leadership, communication, and teamwork, cannot be captured with depth on a 2-dimensional grid.
2. The problem of subjectivity
Another limitation of the 9-box grid is the subjectivity involved, which can lead to unfair evaluations. Managers can be biased, leading to inaccurate assessments of team members' performance and potential. Determining an individual's potential is an uphill battle to begin with, as there is no one concrete way of calculating it. Even if we use a proper scoring system to place our team members on a 9-box grid, the grid still relies heavily on a manager’s perception of a particular team member’s work. If the manager harbors biases, their team members’ capabilities may be rated incorrectly, impacting important talent outcomes.
3. Limited data
Building on what we just mentioned, the 9-box grid is very much based on limited data and can be further impacted by inconsistent data quality, making it challenging to rely on it entirely. Using a limited dataset can lead to missing out on potential talent within the organization.
4. The categorization may lead to ambiguity
One challenge with using the 9-box grid is categorizing team members into three simple categories—low, moderate, and high. If the competencies associated with performance and potential are ill-defined, it becomes difficult to distinguish low from moderate and moderate from high. The issue becomes even more apparent when reviewing talent across different business units, as the competencies used for business units can differ vastly.
5. The grid can potentially curb morale
There are an ongoing debate among researchers on whether sharing the information from a 9-box grid is the right thing to do. After all, no team member would like to see themselves categorized as low performers or having low potential. It may lead them to feel demotivated and inadequate, which can increase the likelihood of voluntary turnover.
Besides, even if it’s not the intention, the grid can create a sense of competition among the team members, leading to unnecessary hierarchies and disrupting team spirit.
Is the 9-box grid still relevant?
“I believe that most HR teams spend an inordinate amount of time on framework selection, whereas the actual value is in the implementation and the usage, and that’s true for talent reviews, goals, and even 1:1s" - Abhay Singh, Head of Marketing, Mesh
In today's fast-paced and dynamic business environment, talent management has become a critical challenge for organizations. While the 9-box grid has long been a popular tool for talent and performance management, the limitations we discussed have led many to question its relevance in modern times.
Many critics argue that the 9-box grid is too simplistic and doesn't fully capture the complexity of modern work environments. Not only that, the subjective nature of the tool and its reliance on limited data can lead to inaccurate assessments of employee's skills and potential.
As a result, many organizations have turned to newer, more advanced talent management tools that leverage data-driven approaches and machine learning algorithms to provide more objective and accurate assessments of employees' performance and potential. The tools can capture the multidimensional nature of competencies and performance by incorporating different sources of data and feedback.
However, despite these limitations, the 9-box grid can still be a valuable tool in certain situations. For example, it can act as a launchpad for discussions on talent development and succession planning. Additionally, it can help managers identify high-potential employees who may benefit from additional development opportunities.
At the end of the day, however, the relevance of the 9-box grid depends on the specific needs and goals of an organization. While it may not be the most advanced or cutting-edge tool available, it can still play a valuable role in a broader talent management strategy when used appropriately.
By combining the 9-box grid with newer tools and approaches, organizations can develop more effective and comprehensive talent management strategies that meet the unique needs of their employees and their businesses.
Using the 9-box grid the right way
Despite all the limitations of the 9-box talent grid, it is still a great tool when beginning your talent assessment process, as it presents a decent picture to get started with. To make the best use of the grid and gather perspectives from different managers and leaders to make the grid objectively accurate. The 9-box grid will serve you well so long as you use it alongside other talent and performance management tools to be accurate and fair towards all your team members.
You can check out the recording of the 4th episode of our virtual show, "The Performance Puzzle", on mastering data-driven talent reviews with Tracy Dodd and Simon Thule Viggers, here.
