So, what do we do with 9 Box Grid?
Finishing year 2018, you probably have gone through dealing with the nine box grid exercise. It is such a straight forward tool that it seems no one really needs any explanation. While I wouldn’t disagree that the strikingly clear tool HR (almost) mandates us to use is necessary, I tend to observe typical dilemma in business (and leadership) is demonstrated in the nine box grid exercise.
Ever since I started a professional career and progressed into mid-management role for decision making, below two expressions tend to take more portion of any business dialogue.
A. “It is a chicken-or-egg situation.”
B. “It depends.”
[A] is a case that we not only tend to mix cause-and-effect relations, but also a realization of the reality that things we believed as an outcome may (or really is) turn to a real cause. [B] is also a case that we need to understand there are trade-offs and necessary tensions among multiple factors. In other words, life is not as simple as it looks.
At my earlier career, particularly immediately after earning an MBA, I had thought a business acumen and leadership come from a capability of making decisions upon a clear understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship, and then making complex matters into simplicity. I was fascinated with 2x2 matrix concept and (almost) believed I got the Excalibur of King Arthur. As time goes by, it did not take long to realize that the cause-and-effect is rather circular than linear and that life is too full of variables to put things into the small boxes.
When we conduct the nine box grid exercise, we “grade” people into one of the small boxes. Most companies use performance-potential matrix, and some uses performance-behavior matrix. On the surface, the practice is very simple. Based on the performance target, which should have been in SMART goals in theory, you decide whether your report met, exceeded, or fell short. Then looking forward, you say whether your report’s behavior or future growth will have a strong trajectory or not. What a beautiful mix of quantitative-driven assessment (performance) and qualitative-driven assessment (potential/behavior)! Once you put the person in one box, other things will follow, such as promotion, merit increase, and a bonus. You make a decision first, and the decision becomes objective data base for other outcomes. I suppose some companies might already have a compensation model that automatically decides promotion, merit increase and bonus amount, once a manager put his/her reports in one of the boxes.
However, in reality, there are other aspects that you cannot neglect. “I have a retention risk of the employee X. If I don’t raise his salary this year, the risk may get increase thus I suppose I need to place him at a better grid.”, or even worse “Employee Y did exceed the performance target, but somehow I don’t enjoy working with him/her. If I grade him/her too highly, he/she may get promoted.” I have even seen a case that a manager graded his report at a very low grade, mostly because his report’s goal was set too ambitiously set mistakenly and also because his other reports had to get better “grades” that year, thus the person got very low assessment though the manager thought the employee was critical to the manager’s team. As an outcome of the nine box grid exercise, the employee had no salary increase and no bonus, and went into a probation period. At the end of the probation period, he left the company with a very attractive offer from another company and the manager had to struggle to find a replacement.
So, what? Do I have a better tool to replace the decades-long HR tool?
No. I still think it is an excellent tool and deserves to remain as one of the effective methods in evaluation. What I want to say is we need to be careful in simplifying complicated things into simple matrix. It needs neither to be an socialistic tool to allocate “fairly”, nor to be a brutal capitalistic tool to cut off the bottom end. I want to say we use the tools as a meaningful references yet not rely on those. A manager should be able to give a promotion to a person who might be in “lower” grade box. HR should not focus on the nine box grid result itself, which takes less than thirty seconds to fill, but should ask managers why their reports are placed in certain box in a greater detail and what the managers will do with the numerous boxes. The later part will take days and months, but I am certain that then the nine box grid can play a crucial role in building a healthy and sustainable organization.
At the end of the day, I believe we need to increase the portion that only humans can do. Computers can’t touch on those areas. People. Emotion. Motivation.