The 9-Box continues to serve as a foundational tool in talent management, offering a way to visualize employee performance and potential in a simple, nine-cell matrix. While this framework remains widely recognized, its application too often remains passive, drawing criticism when not used effectively: names placed in boxes, insights captured in a single moment, and little follow-through beyond documentation.

To unlock full value, the 9-Box must drive coordinated talent action. It should align with strategic HR practices, translate insights into actions, and bridge gaps between HR needs and managerial use.

Why the 9-Box still matters

Despite shifts in organizational structures, evolving leadership models, and the rise of new technologies, the 9-Box has proven to be resilient. It distills complex talent information into a simple snapshot, helping organizations assess individual trajectories and team-wide gaps. It provides a common language for succession conversations and development strategies. Additionally, it anchors key processes—from executive transitions to incentive planning.

However, the challenge is not whether the 9-Box offers robust insights to support strategic talent planning, but whether it engages talent and activates development, thereby avoiding any disconnect between strategic utility and operational usability. HR views the grid as a map for workforce planning and program alignment, while managers often find themselves wondering how to utilize the framework effectively without it becoming a burdensome process. How should they consistently categorize employees? What comes next after placement? How should they act on it?

In increasingly agile environments, the 9-Box must function as a bridge—connecting strategic direction with everyday development. This requires a lens that simplifies its utilization while preserving nuance.

Understanding the core: performance, potential, and the grid

At its core, the conventional 9-Box matrix plots employees across two dimensions:

1. Performance (horizontal axis): How consistently and effectively the employee delivers results relative to goal expectations compared to peers.
   
   
2. Potential (vertical axis): The likelihood that an employee can take on broader responsibilities or more complex roles in the future.
   
   

The resulting nine cells segment employees into categories such as:

• Future Leaders (High Potential / High Performance)
• Emerging Leaders (High Potential / Moderate Performance)
• Valued Contributors (Moderate Potential / Moderate Performance)
• Solid Performers (Low Potential / Moderate Performance)
• New to Role (Low Potential / Low Performance, often transitional)
  
  

This structure provides a helpful snapshot that should spark progress. Nevertheless, this is not always the case due to potential complexities in its use. What’s needed is a way to interpret these categories through a lens that connects to action at both the managerial and programmatic levels.

From evaluation to activation: The 4-Quadrant approach

Overlaying a simplified 4-quadrant framework enables the 9-Box to become more usable and adaptive. It becomes a complementary layer with four activation zones that cut diagonally across the matrix to group employees by developmental trajectory, instead of a fixed category.

Each of the four zones helps managers focus not only on where someone is today but also on what kind of support or movement they need next.

Shake

This group includes individuals who may be misaligned, underperforming, or new to their roles. The goal is to disrupt the status quo, which could involve role reassessment, exit planning, or targeted support to reset expectations.

Nurture

These are stable and solid performers who make dependable contributions. The opportunity lies in maintaining engagement and retention, preventing stagnation, and fostering long-term growth or lateral development.

Challenge

This is for individuals with high potential but inconsistent performance. The emphasis is on activating growth through targeted development, coaching and mentoring, and more precise feedback to unlock capability.

Empower

High-impact players ready for acceleration. The goal is to elevate these individuals by providing stretch assignments, succession opportunities, and advanced development pathways.

This quadrant-based view doesn’t replace the Nine (9) Box—it enhances it. For managers, it distills complexity into something more intuitive. For HR, it provides an organizing framework for development investment and cross-program coordination. Instead of treating each cell as a silo, the four-quadrant lens helps organizations group talent according to their needs. While HR may still use insights that feed into a 9-box framework to support long-term planning, business leaders might utilize its more simplified and agile 4-quadrant version to guide everyday decisions. With this blended approach, it becomes easier to have focused conversations, tailor interventions, and adjust based on both HR strategy and operational realities.

Making the model work: practices that drive real impact

Each quadrant offers a different starting point—but without aligned action, no quadrant delivers value on its own. What turns insight into impact is the connection between the four dimensions and strategic HR programming.

Shake: For individuals in this zone, the priorities are clarity, alignment, and early intervention. 

Performance Management

• Set performance and developmental goals that guide annual performance direction.
• Provide feedback to support employee growth, productivity, and improvement.

Learning & Development

• Create a learning culture that supports career-long education and development.

New Hire Support: For those new to a role, structured onboarding and transition plans ensure acceleration and context.

Nurture: Stable performers still need direction to prevent drift or disengagement. Here, the goal is to deepen contribution and retain potential.

Learning & Development

• Tailor learning offerings to critical workforce segments for increased impact on the highest value roles.

Career Development

• Define career lattices to define robust lateral and vertical mobility.
• Leverage career development technologies and resources for enhanced opportunity identification.

Workplace Wellness

• Define a comprehensive strategy for total worker health across all aspects of employee well-being.
• Conduct a formal wellness assessment to identify critical priorities for driving employee well-being and talent outcomes.
  
  

Challenge: This group thrives when given structure and focused guidance to unlock capability and resolve inconsistency.

Coaching & Mentoring

• Incorporate coaching and mentoring into performance management to better engage employees in their own performance.
• Leverage assessments to identify targeted development opportunities.

Executive Transitions

• Define the highest strategic initiatives to prioritize areas of focus.
• Create a 180-day plan with actions and milestones to target the highest-impact performance areas for a successful role start.
  
  

Empower: Underutilization is a risk for high-potential, high-performance individuals. Empowerment requires strategic placement, recognition, and retention.

Succession Management

• Identify and calibrate successors and HIPOs for each role through structured and standardized assessment sessions.
• Plan individually tailored development for all identified successors and HIPOs.

Leadership Development

• Leverage formal assessments to reliably identify development goals.
• Develop leaders across multiple levels of management.

Total Compensation

• Retain the organization’s talent through tailored compensation strategies and other proactive mechanisms.
• Develop incentive programs that drive outperformance and desired behaviors across the organization.
  
  

It’s essential to treat these program alignments as flexible. They’re designed to guide decision-making, not prescribe it. Managers should remain responsive to context, combining or adjusting approaches based on evolving needs. Equally important, the impact of these practices multiplies when strategic HR programs are integrated, each reinforcing and accelerating the others.

Enabling Practices & Resources

Advanced Succession Management Practices that Create a Structured Approach to Identifying and Developing Future Leaders.

Succession Management is a formalized and structured process that drives how executive and critical skill roles will be staffed and replenished.

Identifying and Calibrating Successors and HIPOs for Each Role Through Structured and Standardized Assessment Sessions.

Naming potential successors for executive and critical roles is a collaboration between leaders that requires thought, preparation, and discussions.

The Nine (9) Box Tool: Document and Facilitate Future Leader Identification and Discussing Actions in Succession Management Processes.

A matrix designed for both use throughout and as a result of the future leader identification portions of the succession management process.