The 9-Box Nobody Talks About: Rethinking How We Identify High Potential

Imagine this. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and an HR Business Partner is sitting across from a department head, doing something that happens in organisations every year, usually around quarter 3 or quarter 4, filling out the 9-box. Nine square grid with performance on one axis and potential on the other, and within the next forty-five minutes, they will quietly decide who is seen as a star, who is considered solid, and who becomes a question mark, often without the knowledge of the people being discussed.

And if you ask HR professionals who have sat through enough of these conversations, many of them will admit there is always a moment where the exercise begins to feel uncomfortably familiar, where the same quiet question comes up year after year, but nobody in the room is fully willing to ask it out loud.

The 9-box grid -  remains one of the most widely used and least questioned tools in HR. The problem isn’t the grid itself the problem is what we are actually measuring when we use it - and who gets left behind because of it.

Let us talk about what the 9-box is supposed to do and why it sits squarely in HR's domain.

HR has always had a dual responsibility. On one side, it protects process through structure, consistency, and compliance, on the other, it is expected to advocate for people, their growth, potential, and future in the organisation.

The 9-box sits right between those two roles. Employees are assessed on two dimensions: performance and potential. Nine combinations that, in theory, help organisations decide who to invest in, who to fast-track, and who may be at risk of disengaging. And in theory, HR is the voice in the room making sure those decisions are fair, evidence-based, and not just bias dressed up as strategy. But for many HR professionals, the same question keeps coming up after enough of these conversations - are we really challenging the decisions being made? or are we simply giving structure to conclusions that were already decided before the spreadsheet was even opened?

Let us name three things that go wrong in almost every 9-box exercise, not because the tool is flawed but because of how it gets used.

Individuals who fall into the upper-right quadrant, often referred to as high potential, typically exhibit certain characteristics. They speak up in meetings, they are visible to leadership, they are confident, and often people who already have a head start.
And the people who quietly deliver, year after year, without the noise? They land somewhere in the middle. They are labeled "solid performers." They are neither given development investment nor groomed for anything, and when the session ends and the document is saved, that is the question that lingers. Are we identifying potential or are we just rewarding the performance we can, see?

Problem one- When a manager says someone has "high potential," what do they mean? Usually, they mean: this person reminds them of themselves at that age, or this person is vocal in meetings and senior leaders notice them, or this person is ambitious and tells me they want to grow.

None of those things are potential; they are visibility, confidence, and self-advocacy and those things correlate very strongly with privilege with who was raised to speak up, who was told their opinion matters and who has had access to networks and education that made them comfortable in boardrooms.

The quiet engineer who solves problems, no one else can? She doesn't promote herself so; she sits in box five as a solid performer but has no development budget, no stretch assignment, and no mention in the succession conversation.

Problem two- HR professionals are often present in 9-box discussions as facilitators but not as challengers. Which means when a manager puts someone in the bottom box because they had a difficult quarter, or when an entire team mysteriously clusters in the middle because the manager does not want to differentiate, HR notes it but doesn not always question it.

The questions exist. What evidence are we using? What does potential actually mean for this role? Most HR professionals know they should be asking this question, but that room has its own momentum. Seniority sits at the head of the table. The meeting is already running long, and so, HR facilitates, the boxes get filled, and the questions that should have been asked stay unasked.

Problem three - Once an employee is calibrated, that label stays sometimes for years. High potential gets the sponsorship, the international assignment, and the visibility program. Everyone else gets their standard increment and a development plan that nobody revisits. And here's what makes this particularly sharp from an HR standpoint: organisations then wonder why engagement scores are low. Why is their talent pipeline thin? Why do people leave for competitors who "gave them more opportunity." The opportunity gap is not an accident. It is the 9-box, compounding quietly over time.

Now, to be fair, the problem is not the tool itself. The problem is how casually most organisations use it. Because the 9-box only works when HR brings rigour into the room. That starts before the session even opens. Define what potential means for this organisation, this level, and this function. Is it the ability to lead larger teams? Work through ambiguity? Pick up new domains quickly? If nobody agrees on the definition before the grid gets filled, the whole exercise is just instinct dressed up as strategy.

Bring data. HR has performance trends, peer ratings, and project outcomes sitting in systems nobody opens during these sessions. That data exists to challenge assumptions so use it. When the numbers don not match the box, someone is about to land in the wrong box.And when you notice the same kinds of people consistently landing in the same places; the quiet ones, the ones who don't promote themselves, the ones who deliver without visibility name them, not to derail the conversation but to make it honest.

The grid is the starting point. What matters is what the organisation does after: who gets developed, who gets the opportunity, and whether anyone ever checks if the high-potential labels turned out to be right. The 9-box is not the villain of this story, It is a tool and like most tools, it does exactly what the person holding it decides to do with it.

The question is, what are you deciding? because somewhere in your organisation, there is someone sitting in a box that does not match their reality. Someone whose potential is quiet, not absent. Someone who is building, mentoring, delivering - without the noise that gets noticed. And the only thing standing between that person and a label that follows them for the next three years is someone in that room willing to slow the conversation down and ask: wait - what are we basing this on?

That someone can be you.Not in a grand, disrupt-the-meeting way. Just a note or a question or the willingness to say - "I would like to revisit this one before we close."That, honestly, is what this profession is for. Not the frameworks, not the grids but the people inside them.