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    You are here Home » performance and potential matrix

    12 “Out-of-the-Box” Ways to Use a 9 Box Matrix

    Last updated on Jul 15, 2013 by Dan McCarthy · This post may contain affiliate links

    A long, long time ago, back in the days when Jack Welch was
    leading GE, organizations starting using a “9 box”
    performance
    and potential matrix
    for succession planning and leadership development.

    Despite its critics, the 9 box lives on. And it should – in
    its purest, simplest form, it works. It’s an effective and efficient way for a
    leadership team to assess and differentiate its talent pool, diagnose
    individual and organizational development needs, and identify high potentials.

    However , like many simple best practices, they tend to
    mutate over the years as they are passed from organization to organization. HR and
    managers that have tried the 9-box figure if it works as a tool to discuss
    talent, then way don’t we use it for_______? Or, they often just want to add
    their own bells and whistles.

    Some of these variations seem like nice ideas, and others not
    so good.

    Here’s 12 variations of the 9-box that I’ve seen. I’m not
    endorsing any of them – not because I think they are bad (although I think some are), it’s just that I
    don’t have enough personal experience or evidence to.

    1. Use it as a
    budgeting tool
    to allocate training resources. Organizations can take their
    development budget (or focus, time) and spread it out amongst the nine boxes.
    They can take a “peanut butter” approach (spread it out evenly across all 9
    boxes), or differentiate and load up their investment on their high potentials
    or some other box.

    2. Use it as a way to identify
    organizational talent gaps for recruiting
    . Organizations may discover they
    have a lack of talent in certain parts of the organization (i.e., not enough “A
    players”, or ready successors) and use the process to focus their recruiting
    efforts (buy vs. build).

    3. Use it as a tool for compensation
    administration
    . An organization can use it as a guide for determining pay
    increases, bonuses, or other forms of variable compensation. For example, you
    may want to give stock options or grants in order to retain your high
    potentials, and cash bonuses to reward your high performers. 

    4. Use it as a downsizing
    decision tool
    . I’m not even sure if this is legal, but I’ve heard of
    organizations using it to determine who stays and who goes.

    5. Use it for peers
    to rate each other
    . A reader actually asked me if I had heard of anybody
    else doing this, as they were considering trying it. I have not, and didn’t
    come up that have with any when I posted the question to a couple discussion
    boards. Intuitively it feels like a bad idea, but in today’s world of rating
    just about everything via social media, who knows?

    6. Use it as a tool
    to guide development planning
    . While every individual have their own unique
    development needs, some organizations provide general development guidelines
    based on where someone is on the grid.

    7.  Use it to assess individual contributors. Most
    organizations use the 9-box as a tool to assess managers for potential to move
    up in the organization for succession planning. However, I’ve seen some
    leadership teams use it as way to discuss whether individual contributors have
    the potential “to grow, learn, and take on new responsibilities”, etc… They’re
    just defining for themselves what “potential” means, but it’s important to have
    clear and valid criteria, just as you would when assessing for “leadership”
    potential.

    8. Come up with descriptions
    for each of the 9 boxes
    . I really hate
    this! This is when teams decide they need to come up with cute and specific
    descriptions (i.e., “misfit”, “solid performer”, “trusted pro”) for each of the
    nine boxes in order to rate their talent. It only confuses the raters and makes
    it harder to place people, as the descriptions never seem to describe their
    people. Stick to the two variables: performance
    and potential
    . Most (90%) of teams get it and don’t need the added
    complexity – it adds little value.

    9. Subdivide each of
    the 9 boxes
    . Another despised variation, often favored by the engineers and
    scientists. They want to turn a 9-box into a 27 box or more, attempting to add
    another level of preciseness and complexity.

    10. Require a forced
    distribution
    . Some organizations require that a minimum of 10% of any
    talent pool be placed in the “3C” box (low performance and potential” and only
    a maximum of 20% can be in the 3 “upper right corner” boxes, or some other
    variation of an allocation requirement. While many despise any kind of forced
    ranking methodology, I’ve found it can be an effective way to force a team to
    differentiate its talent. Then again, it usually works just as well when a team
    is encouraged to differentiate, vs.
    forcing them to.

    11. Use “keys”, or
    codes
    to identify things like “readiness”, “relocatability”, race and
    gender (yes, it’s legal to use EEO codes), and all sorts of other ways to cram
    more data onto a single page.

    12. Replacing
    “performance and potential” with other scales
    (i.e., “leadership and
    results”, or “leadership and management”). Whatever. If it serves a need, then
    why not?

    What other variations of the 9-box performance and potential
    have you seen?
    « What Events Shaped You as a Leader?
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