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Identifying high-potential employees early is key for startups looking to invest in their growth and prepare future leaders. Tools like the 9-Box Grid are essential in making this process strategic and efficient.
The 9-Box Grid helps founders, HR leaders, and operators proactively assess and develop talent. It offers a simple, structured approach that enables startups, even without formal HR teams, to evaluate employee performance and potential effectively.
This article will walk you through how to use the 9-Box Grid to identify top talent, ensure fair performance evaluations, and create strong succession plans for your growing team.
What is the 9-Box Grid?
The 9-box grid is a commonly employed talent assessment tool that evaluates employees based on two key factors: performance and potential.
Performance assesses how well an employee delivers results, meets objectives, and contributes to company success. Potential, on the other hand, gauges an employee's ability to take on more responsibility, grow into leadership roles, and succeed as they advance within the company. These factors are plotted on a 3x3 matrix, creating nine categories that help leaders visualize their talent pool.
The 9-Box Matrix
The grid is divided into three performance levels (low, medium, high) and three potential levels (low, medium, high):
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Why the 9-Box Grid is Ideal for Startups and Scaleups
According to Lukman Giwa, HR Advisor at the NHS, the adaptability of the grid makes it very valuable, especially for startups. He emphasizes that the grid can enable startups to prioritize talent development by focusing on employees with high potential who can drive growth and innovation.
Here are some other reasons the 9-Box Grid is ideal for startups and scaleups:
- Supports Succession Planning Without a Full HR Department: Startups often lack dedicated HR teams, making structured talent planning difficult. The 9-Box Grid offers a simple yet effective way to identify future leaders and ensure roles always have a pipeline of strong successors.
- Visualizes Leadership Readiness During High Growth: Knowing who can step into leadership roles is crucial when scaling rapidly. This framework provides a clear snapshot of employee potential, helping founders and team leads make informed promotion decisions.
- Helps Focus L&D Where It Matters Most: The 9-Box Grid helps focus L&D efforts where they matter most by identifying high-potential employees who would benefit from leadership development. This ensures that learning investments directly impact business growth. At the same time, it minimizes the risk of losing top performers by proactively mapping their career progression and creating personalized development plans.
- Applies Even in Distributed or Remote Teams: For remote-first companies, it's easy to overlook employees who aren't physically present in the office. This framework ensures fair, consistent performance evaluations across all locations, helping remote team members get the recognition and opportunities they deserve.
How to Use the 9-Box Grid
When used effectively, the 9-Box grid can be highly effective in building strong teams. Here's how:
- Define clear criteria for performance and potential: Ensure all stakeholders (managers and employees alike) understand what constitutes high, medium, and low performance and potential in the organization. Align on specific, measurable criteria to assess both factors in the organization.
- Gather data from reviews, OKRs, and manager input: Use performance reviews, manager assessments, and other sources to determine an employee's performance and potential. This will provide a comprehensive view and reduce bias.
- Calibrate potential ratings across teams: Managers and leadership should discuss where each employee fits on the grid, ensuring alignment on talent decisions. Hold regular cross-department meetings to calibrate ratings, ensuring consistency and objectivity across teams.
- Plot employees collaboratively: Two heads are better than one. Managers and leadership should discuss where each employee fits on the grid, ensuring alignment from all stakeholders on talent decisions. Collaboration helps eliminate individual bias and strengthens team-wide buy-in on the final placement.
- Analyse patterns: Look for patterns that reveal leadership gaps, underused talents, and areas for investment. This analysis will help you target key development opportunities and prioritize where to focus growth efforts.
- Create targeted development plans: It is nice to map out the 9-Box Grid, but what's next? Each box should have action plans for what's next. Are there programs available to coach and develop emerging talents? Are there leadership roles available for future leaders?
- Integrate into performance reviews and update regularly: Make the 9-Box Grid a part of your regular performance review cycle. Revisit it periodically (quarterly or biannually) to track employee growth, adjust development plans, and make data-driven decisions about promotions or new opportunities.
Common Mistakes to Avoid with the 9-Box Grid
The 9-Box Grid is an exciting model that could serve a startup and a scaleup. However, it could also be susceptible to these common pitfalls:
- Labeling people permanently: Avoid locking employees into fixed categories, such as "low potential." An employee's placement on the grid can change over time with proper development and guidance. Ensure you regularly revisit the grid during performance reviews and create tailored development plans to track progress and evolve their role.
- Using it once and forgetting about it: The 9-Box Grid should be an ongoing tool, not a one-time exercise. Use it consistently to track employee progress. Set regular reminders to update the grid and review the development of key team members, ensuring it remains a dynamic part of your talent strategy.
- Failing to calibrate: Without team-wide calibration, performance and potential ratings might vary wildly by manager, leading to bias and inconsistent outcomes. To avoid this, regularly calibrate ratings across teams by holding cross-department meetings where leadership aligns on the criteria and ensures fairness in assessment.
- Not acting on insights: Plotting people on the grid is just step one. The next step is to create actionable development plans for employees based on their grid placement. For instance, provide mentorship and growth opportunities for high-potential employees or additional support for those requiring development.
- Ignoring remote employees: Overlooking remote talent when building your grid risks missing high-potential team members just because they're not in the room. Use virtual meetings and digital tools to ensure remote employees are evaluated fairly and included in the talent planning process.
Integrating the 9-Box Grid with Performance & Development
The 9-box grid isn't just a one-time exercise. It should be an ongoing part of your talent strategy, woven into how your company thinks about performance, growth, and long-term success. When used well, the grid becomes a powerful tool for making consistent, intentional, and growth-focused people decisions.
1. Integrate the 9-Box Grid into Performance Cycles
During quarterly or biannual reviews, use the grid alongside performance metrics like SMART goals and OKRs. This helps managers assess current performance and identify an employee's readiness for future growth. As Lukman Giwa advises, the grid should guide conversations and developmental goals, helping managers strike a balance between past output and future potential.
2. Use the 9-Box Grid to Prioritize Learning & Development
The grid is also key for sharpening L&D priorities. High-potential employees, particularly those nearing leadership roles, benefit from targeted development. By mapping employees’ performance and potential, managers can better allocate resources. For instance, employees with high potential but lower performance may need coaching, while high performers with untapped potential might benefit from stretch assignments or leadership training. This targeted approach ensures L&D efforts are effective and aligned with company goals.
3. Streamline Career Pathing and Promotion Planning
The 9-Box Grid helps proactively identify employees who are ready for the next step. Rather than waiting for employees to ask for new roles or reacting to requests, the grid enables leadership to plan career progression. Over time, you can track whether employees are progressing, plateauing, or need re-engagement, ensuring that promotion decisions are made strategically and in alignment with organizational needs.
Real-Life Example: 9-Box Grid at a Scaling Startup
Let's take the fictional example of a fast-growing SaaS startup with a distributed team across three markets: Nigeria, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. After growing revenue and increasing staff strength, leadership realized their approach to talent was becoming reactive. Promotions were based on tenure, not readiness, and they were unsure who could step into leadership roles as they scaled. As a result, high performers with leadership potential were overlooked, while others were promoted without the skills or experience, leading to some challenges. Staff began to feel undervalued, leading to some staff leaving. That's when they introduced the 9-box grid.
Working with the small HR team and the departmental leads, the startup defined clear criteria for performance and potential. For performance, they used a mix of OKRs, peer feedback, and recent review scores. For potential, they assessed leadership behaviors, learning agility, and adaptability in a startup environment. The criteria were selected to support the startup's values of innovation, flexibility, and alignment with the importance of this grid in guiding talent development.
After plotting their team on the grid, key insights emerged:
- Two high-performing engineers consistently exceeded goals but rated low on potential due to a lack of cross-functional collaboration and initiative. This prompted 1:1 development plans and stretch projects to help them grow in strategic thinking.
- A Customer Success Manager in Toronto was flagged as a future leader —sitting at the top right of the grid (high performance, high potential)—but hadn't been in the spotlight due to timezone differences. Leadership quickly included them in the next manager training program and promoted them three months later.
Using the grid, this startup aligned leadership on who was ready for what and made people's decisions with clarity, not guesswork. It gave them a shared language for growth, reduced turnover, and ensured remote employees weren't overlooked.
Maximize Your Team Potential with the 9-Box Grid
Whether your team is remote or in-office, the 9-Box Grid offers a comprehensive framework to track talent growth, minimize bias, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
When integrated into your performance cycles and development strategies, it empowers your organization to make smarter, more intentional people decisions, driving long-term success.
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