Aligning people and profit for growth is more important than ever. HR managers and business executives are continuously challenged to balance leadership development with business needs. Using a 9 box talent grid, you can plot employees based on two key dimensions: performance and growth potential.
- Performance: How consistently an employee delivers results in their role.
- Potential: A.k.a learning agility, is the speed someone can grow, take on new challenges, and adapt to changing conditions.
A simple 9 box grid can help organizations manage leadership talent demand, ensuring that they develop the right leaders at the right time—whether the business is in a phase of rapid growth or navigating a contraction.
Each of the nine boxes within the grid represents a combination of performance and potential, providing guidance on how employees should be developed or managed based on their current performance and potential for future growth.
How to interpret a 9 box grid
How many people should be in each box in the 9 box grid?
Effective leadership development begins with the ability to predict the demand for leadership talent. When a 9 box talent grid is populated accurately, it can help managers forecast leadership needs and optimize resources based on the company’s growth stage.
The ultimate reason for investing in the development of leaders is illustrated in the image below. If the demand for leaders (orange) grows faster than the supply of talent (green) then a leadership vacuum is created and this results in people being promoted before they are ready.
During periods of rapid exponential growth or in conditions where there is a high level of uncertainty, companies should aim to have 20-25% of their leadership talent positioned in the highest potential areas (represented by the green and blue quadrants in the 9 box talent grid).
In a stable growth environment, companies should aim to have about 15% of their leadership talent positioned in the highest potential areas.
However, in a negative growth environment e.g. technology is reducing the need for headcount, businesses should limit this percentage to 5-10% avoid creating a leadership surplus, which could lead to talent loss because of a lack of career progression.
Promotability is not potential
One of the key concepts reinforced by a 9 box talent grid is the distinction between promotability and potential. While potential—or learning agility—refers to the long-term capacity of an individual to grow and tackle new challenges, promotability speaks to a person’s immediate readiness to move up within the organization.
This difference is essential for HR managers seeking to build agile leadership pipelines. By evaluating both dimensions separately, they can ensure they are developing leaders who are not only capable of long-term growth but are also positioned to take on key roles when the business demands it. For example, a high-potential individual may not be promotable today but could be groomed for leadership roles over the next few years, matching the company’s evolving needs.
Strategic benefits for business leaders
For business executives, designing an effective talent management strategy is more than a people issue—it’s a profitability issue. Misaligning leadership development with the business’s growth curve can result in overdevelopment, leading to wasted resources, or underdevelopment, resulting in costly leadership gaps. The 9 box talent grid enables executives to align leadership talent with broader business goals, ensuring that people strategies directly contribute to profitability.
Why use a 9 box in your talent reviews?
The 9 box talent framework is a versatile, scalable tool that helps both HR managers and business executives manage leadership development in line with business strategy. By helping organizations identify the right leaders to develop and when to invest in leadership growth, the grid offers a competitive advantage in both scale-up and declining markets. It provides a clear, data-driven roadmap that aligns leadership talent with business needs, ensuring sustained profitability and growth.
Note: These distributions are more relevant to functional areas than to an entire business, but can be used for multi-national businesses that need to manage different rates of growth in different regions or countries.
What comes next?
Download our HR guidebook on succession planning, and discover the 8 essential questions to get your C-suite fully on board with your talent strategy.
