Identifying your MVPs

Does the 9-box talent grid tell you what you need to know? Sue Filmer, principal, Mercer, proposes a 7-box model that can be adapted to fit an organisation’s own talent requirements and help identify its Most Valuable Players.

A tool found in many talent management toolkits is the 9-box talent grid. With its horizontal axis assessing future potential – low, medium and high – and its vertical access rating current performance – poor, good and outstanding – it enables employees to be allocated to a talent category. 

Those in the top right box will be the high performers with the greatest potential, and those in the bottom left box will be the lowest performers with the least potential. The other boxes will show employees who are performing and displaying potential to varying degrees. By separating performance and potential, the 9-box grid helps clarify the distinction between an individual who is delivering good performance in the current role and an individual who is displaying potential to produce good performance in another role. 

In theory, great, but in reality it is totally dependent on the definition, and more importantly the interpretation, of each category. Also, several of the boxes are likely to have similar talent groupings. To overcome this some organisations collate the information from the 9-box grid into three main talent groups, with the primary focus of talent management activities being on the “A” players:

§          A players – those individuals who display high performance and high potential;

§          B players – those individuals who display moderate to low potential

§          but acceptable to high levels of performance;

§          C players – moderate to poor performers who have high potential as well as poor performers with low potential.

Determining an employee’s correct position on each axis can prove challenging.  Assigning an employee a performance rating can be achieved by taking the ratings from the annual performance management process, but in many cases the performance management data is not accurate enough to be transferred directly into a talent grid without some interpretation or quality assurance. In other cases, the rating of performance for a talent assessment is more about taking an informed judgement on the levels of sustained performance and the outcomes achieved over a number of years, taking into account the wider business context.

Organisations often struggle assessing potential as it is subjective and relies on a common agreement of what potential is within the context of the business and how it can be seen in an individual. In summary, for the 9-box grid to be effective there needs to be a clear understanding of what the three categories of performance look like in a talent context and how the three categories of potential are displayed. Its strength is that it is simple, visual and everyone quickly gets it.

While categorising employees in this way has been helpful for talent review panels, there are now some interesting examples of where the 9-box talent grid has evolved into something more powerful. Mercer, for example, has set out a 7-box model (see figure 1) that takes a different approach at categorising high-calibre employees and provides a different perspective on the strength and depth of the talent pool and pipeline.

Fig 1:

The debate here is no longer solely focused on current performance versus perceived future potential – it is about identifying the Most Valuable Players (MVPs) and being clear about the contribution these individuals bring to the organisation and how best to develop and deploy them.

The words within the 7-box model can be adapted to fit an organisation’s own talent requirements. The end result is to achieve enhanced insight from the refined talent segmentation, and to increase the value from the debate on which individual is in which talent segment and how to get the most from that type of talent. This helps the business better understand where its talent is and how best to target appropriate talent attraction, development and, most importantly, retention programmes for MVPs.