The 9-Box Grid: Benefits & Limitations in 2023 (+Template)
- February 15, 2022
When assessing employee performance or considering the value of an individual for an organization, HR needs to assess two dimensions: an employee’s current contribution and future potential.
The assessment of an employee’s current contribution calibrates the performance of their teams to ensure appropriate recognition and reward.
On the other hand, assessing future potential helps identify individuals with high performers with the potential to grow into future leadership roles, called succession planning.
Improving employee performance and identifying team members for future leadership roles enables organizations to increase job satisfaction and improve retention rates.
One of the most commonly used models for assessing employee performance is the 9-box grid. The 9-box grid is a simple, free exercise that groups employee performance into quadrants and ensures consistent treatment of employees across different performance groupings.
What Is the 9-Box Grid?
The 9 box grid provides a framework to assess employee performance and enables succession planning. The exercise’s grid maps employees against two axes: current performance and future potential.
The vertical (y) axis indicates growth potential, referring to an individual’s potential to grow into leadership roles. The horizontal axis (x) represents an employees’ current performance, identifying whether they are below, meeting, or exceeding performance expectations. The 9 boxes in the grid result from the relationship between their ‘potential’ and ‘performance’.
What Is the Purposes of the 9-Box Grid?
- To capture a comprehensive view of the talent pipeline both within and between business units and identify critical gaps that need to be addressed
- To determine the potential, risk, and impact of loss of our current talent
- To identify strategies for developing, retaining, and working with our current talent
- To enable cross-functional and cross-organizational discussions around our current bench strength
- To identify potential successors both locally and systemwide
- To boost internal recruitment leads when vacancies occur in leadership positions
- To identify the appropriate target audience for high-potential development opportunities
- To expand discussions on building diverse leadership talent
Breaking Down the Quadrants of the 9 Box Grid
HR and managers work together to assign each employee to relevant boxes on the 9-box grid based on the x-axis which represents an employee’s current performance and the y-axis that represents their future potential.
The 9 box grid consists of the following groups, segments, or boxes:
- Low Performer, High Potential
- Low Performer, Moderate Potential
- Low Performer, Low Potential
- Moderate Performer, High Potential
- Moderate Performer, Moderate Potential
- Moderate Performer, Low Potential
- High Performer, High Potential
- High Performer, Moderate Potential
- High Performer, Low Potential
When performance and potential are assessed and plotted on the graph, employees in the upper right quadrant (Box 1) are identified as potential candidates for succession.
In contrast, employees in the lower left quadrant (Box 9) may need to be reassigned or let go of the organization. The boxes on the grid help HR teams determine the suitable investments for the right talent to develop future leaders.
Employees in box 1 should be ready for top leadership within 6 months to a year, while those in boxes 2 and 3 have a longer timeline but can be groomed for an eventual transition to box 1.
Here’s what a sample 9-box grid looks like:
(Remember the job requirements and personal targets differ for organizations depending on their job structure)
| Low Performance | Moderate Performance | High Performance | |
| High Potential | Box 5:
| Box 2:
| Box 1:
|
| Moderate Potential | Box 8:
| Box 6:
| Box 3:
|
| Low Potential | Box 9:
| Box 7:
| Box 4:
|
Benefits of Using the 9-Box Grid
Let’s discuss the advantages of using the 9-box grid:
1. Identify valuable talent
The 9-box grid allows you to spot high performers within the organization who have great potential to become future leaders. It helps strategize and direct your resources intelligently to engage and develop the future leaders of your organization. Additionally, when internal promotions come up, the 9-box grid gives you an idea of the suitable candidates to consider for these opportunities.
2. Highlight development opportunities
While looking for high potential leaders in the 9-box grid, the weaker players – who aren’t currently suited for their current job or lack specific skillsets, are also highlighted in the process. These insights enable HR and managers to investigate these employees further and provide the best support to reach their next career goal and develop these team members into better performers.
Here’s a template with suggested action items in each box.
3. Increases transparency
The 9-box grid approach requires open and honest communication within the leadership team to evaluate the performance and potential of every employee. These discussions help clarify leaders’ expectations of the employees for contributing to the organizational goals.
Tom Sullivan
President and CEO, ProGrowth Associates LLC
Limitations of the 9-Box Grid
Here are a few of the challenges of using the 9-box grid for talent and performance management:
1. Distinguishing between performance & potential
Distinguishing between performance and potential can be difficult, especially without a clear definition or understanding of both concepts.
Organizations usually have a well-defined method for evaluating performance; however, evaluating potential is still less familiar for many, resulting in individuals being rated inaccurately on potential. Without clearly defined processes for identifying team members with high potential, unconscious biases may also impact employee ratings.
2. Employee reactions
If you decide to be transparent and honest with your employees and share performance information, it may lead to discouragement and lower employee morale. Low-ranking employees may react negatively to being labeled a “low performer” or “low potential” – and for good reason.
Sharing this information with employees can also create a hierarchy among succession candidates, disrupting teamwork and relationships in the organization.
3. Labels employees
The 9-box grid confines your employees to a specific label, affecting how management sees them. For instance, describing an employee as a low performer with low potential on the grid might change how management treats and sees that employee from that point on.
How to Create a 9-Box Grid in 3 Steps
There are three steps to creating a 9-box grid for succession planning for your organization:
1. Assess employee performance
During the first step, the performance level of each employee is assessed. The exact criteria to score performance varies depending on the needs of an organization. But each employee must be categorized into one of these three groups:
- Low performance – The employee does not match their job requirements and fails to achieve their targets and goals. They demonstrate a lack of motivation and alignment with the organization’s vision.
- Moderate performance – The employee partially matches their job requirements and individual targets and goals.
- High performance – The employee fully meets their job requirements and individual targets and shows consistent performance in all tasks.
2. Assess employee potential
As the next step, the potential of each employee is assessed. An employee’s potential is defined by how much they are expected to grow in the future, their willingness to learn new things, and their ability to apply their knowledge in routine tasks.
As discussed in one of the challenges, evaluating employee potential is less familiar for organizations than assessing employee performance.
To bring both concepts down to simplest terms, they can be distinguished as performance being the past behavior and potential being the expected future behavior. Potential often falls into the following categories:
- Low potential – The employee has either reached their maximum capacity or lacks the motivation to grow further.
- Moderate potential – The employee has the potential to further develop in their current role in terms of performance or expertise.
- High potential – The employee performs beyond the expectations of their position and responsibilities. They naturally and enthusiastically take on leadership opportunities and are always prepared for new challenges.
Note – Assessing potential is different from assessing performance, even if the process seems to be the same. For instance, an employee with low potential might already be working at their maximum capacity required for the current position, making them unsuitable for becoming future leaders.
On the other hand, if an employee is low or moderate in the performance scale but has high potential, they can be considered for leadership roles in the next two to three years, given that they undergo effective training and development.
3. Merge performance and potential into a 3×3 grid
Once all employees have been scored as low, moderate, or high on both performance and potential, the final step is to plot them on a 3×3 grid, resulting in your 9-box grid. The grid gives managers and HR a clear view of where each employee stands.
How to Create a Performance Management Action Plan With the 9-Box Grid
Once employees are categorized into appropriate boxes of the 9-box grid, managers are able to create individual development plans for every employee based on their respective category.
In general, you want to invest the most time and effort in high performers with high potential and the least in low performers with low potential. The investment efforts should increase as you move towards the right and upwards and decrease towards the left and downwards.
If you had to invest $1000 on employee development plan, here’s how it should be divided among the different talent categories.
Now let’s discuss the action plan to be employed for improving performance for the employees in the 9-box grid:
| Low Performer, Low Potential |
|
| Moderate Performer, Low Potential (or) Low Performer, Moderate Potential |
|
| High Peformer, Low Potential |
|
| Low Performer, High Potentia |
|
| Moderate Performer, Moderate Potential |
|
| High Performer, Moderate Potential (or) Moderate Performer, High Potential Potential |
|
| High Performer, High Potential |
|
Free 9-Box Grid Template
To help you execute employee performance and development planning, we’ve created a free 9-box grid template for you to download below:
✓ Thank you, the template will be sent to your email
The 9-box grid model helps manage employees with different levels of performance and potential in your organization.
Remember, the true value of the 9-box grid is not about putting certain labels to employees. It is rather implemented to evaluate an employee’s success and ensure that the organization invests in the right development programs for the right employee.
Invest in digital adoption platforms such as Whatfix to find the maximum ROI on your employee development programs. Using DAPs as your training software empowers employees to upskill themselves on the latest tools, applications, or processes without disrupting their workflow and productivity. It’s the best resource to make your employee development plans future-ready and valuable.
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