Every leader has felt the anxiety that comes with looking at an organizational chart and wondering, “What happens if someone leaves tomorrow?” Whether the result of a future retirement, career mobility, or unexpected life changes, leadership transitions are inevitable. Still, many organizations treat these events as sudden emergencies rather than predictable milestones. If our standard approach to continuity boils down to generic leadership training punctuated by the occasional personnel emergency, we’re missing an opportunity to actively engineer stability rather than merely hope for it.
As we discussed in our last article, “The Big Handoff,” true succession planning goes beyond an HR activity to a fundamental operational obligation. It calls for a move away from the abstract idea of “talent development” and toward preparing specific individuals to step into specific roles with highly targeted skills. To transform this intentional transfer of institutional knowledge into a functional reality, leadership teams need an objective, reliable tool to evaluate their people through a succession lens.
ArchPoint employs a variety of frameworks for this task, but the most widely adopted is the 9-Box method. Developed by McKinsey in the 1970’s and subsequently popularized by GE, 9-Box is designed to strip away the subjective guesswork and arbitrary programs that often plague talent management. And when it comes to the five succession planning steps laid out in the previous article, 9-Box is a great tool for taking us from what to how. So, let’s first look at how the 9-Box method works, then we’ll revisit how it helps us execute our real-world succession-planning steps.
In a Nutshell: The 9-Box Method
At its simplest, the 9-box method consists of a 3×3 grid measuring two main things:
- Performance (The Horizontal Axis): This is a snapshot of how well someone is performing their actual job right now—are they hitting their numbers, meeting their goals, and pulling their weight?
- Potential (The Vertical Axis): This is about how much room to grow someone has—can they handle more complex work, lead others, and adapt to the future? Do they embody the organization’s culture?
When we plot an employee on these axes, they end up in one of nine boxes. We find those with the highest potential to impact the organization in the top right corner and those who are likely a misfit for the organization in the bottom left. In between is a spectrum of boxes reflecting various designations.
Depending on who you ask, the top-right box might have names like “stars,” “high performers,” “bar raisers,” or “supernovas.” Elsewhere on the grid you might see names like “core players,” “enigmas,” “potential gems,” or even “brilliant jerks.” Some naming schemes are better than others, but we generally try to veer away from judgmental language and toward developmentally-focused language. Ultimately, what the boxes are called is much less important than understanding the developmental path each box represents.
In Practice: Putting the 9-Box Method to Work
What 9-Box ultimately allows us to do is take action toward a structured, intentional succession strategy. To show this, let’s revisit our five succession-planning steps and demonstrate how 9-Box helps us get a handle on each:
- Audit the Retirement Risk (and other exit risks). We can’t effectively plan for the future if we don’t know where the holes are going to be. Because 9-Box gives us a bird’s-eye view of the entire team, we can easily evaluate our most critical roles—especially those with leaders nearing retirement—to identify the high potential individuals who might be ready to step in. Just as critically, it helps us spot “flight risks”. For example, if we identify someone whose hidden potential is going untapped, they might be getting frustrated and looking toward the exit. By catching this on the grid, we can fix the problem before we’re left with an unexpected vacancy.
- Understand Your Bench Strength. It’s tempting to think our best performers are automatically our best future managers. While that may be true in some cases, by separating performance from potential, 9-Box helps us avoid lumping these characteristics together when we shouldn’t. We might identify people who are great at their specific jobs but show low potential for leadership roles. These are often our subject matter experts. The grid reminds us to keep them happy and engaged in their current roles instead of guiding them toward management, where they might not excel. Similarly, the grid might identify someone who is struggling in their current role but has massive potential to lead if placed in the right environment.
- Move from General Skills to Role-Specific Scenarios. Once 9-Box shows us the team members with high potential for a given role, we can put them in the driver’s seat of actual business challenges and provide them with stretch assignments to emphasize the specific skills a future leadership position will require. By doing this, we aren’t just teaching them—we’re offering them relevant, role-specific scenarios with an opportunity to show what they can do and learn from experience.
- Incentivize Succession Stewards. While succession planning shouldn’t be just an HR activity, it likewise shouldn’t fall exclusively on individual managers to evaluate their teams in isolation. The 9-Box method can help to avoid both of these possibilities and embed succession planning deeper into an organization’s culture through the use of regular calibration meetings (a GE innovation). These are forums for managers across an organization to meet and discuss their teams’ ratings with real evidence. This encourages leaders to overcome any biases and make assessments based on the most objective, agreed-upon data possible. It also invites different perspectives into the evaluation process, bringing everyone into the succession stewardship process.
- Engage in Results-Based Mentoring. Finally, 9-Box gives mentoring a clear purpose. Because the grid allows us to track progress over time, we should be able to watch as a high potential employee with moderate performance migrates toward higher performance and even higher potential. If they aren’t moving, it suggests the current mentoring strategy isn’t working, and we can adjust the plan. This ensures the guidance is practical and actually prepares them for a future role.
A Few Things to Keep in Mind
Before drawing our first grid, we should remember that, like any tool, 9-Box is not a magic wand. It has the potential to be overly subjective if we aren’t careful—for instance, managers can sometimes overrate people who act just like them. This is why the use of objective data—things like sales numbers, project deadlines, and leadership assessments—are important; and why regular calibration meetings are useful.
It’s also important to consider how transparent we want to be. Telling someone they have low potential is not usually an effective motivation strategy, which is why focusing conversations on the development plan rather than specific labels or boxes is generally a better idea.
Safeguarding the Future
When an indispensable leader exits without a clear successor, they often take years of undocumented expertise, procedural nuances, and strategic relationships with them. The 9-Box method provides an objective, repeatable blueprint to ensure that organizational knowledge survives the natural tides of retirement and career mobility. It helps us audit risk, understand the talent bench, train future leaders in real scenarios, maintain accountability, and ensure our mentoring process actually gets results.
Over the coming years, we will see a massive transfer of knowledge across almost every sector. Our true legacy as leaders rests on whether we can make our organizations more resilient, our talent benches deeper, and our teams more prepared to take on the demands of the future.
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