Fifteen Minutes

In 2017 I inherited an annual review process: weeks of forms, self-assessments, calibration meetings and ratings on a five-point scale. At the end of it I had no answer to the only three questions I actually had about anyone on the team. Is this person in the right role? Are they being challenged? Are they being rewarded — in growth and in money — in proportion to what they are doing and what they could do? The process was painstaking, and it was irrelevant to every decision I had to make.

So I used the nine box instead, and reviewed the whole organization in fifteen minutes. It is on the shelf today as The Nine Box — a manual and a template — the fourth instrument, and the one that joins two things already there.

Two axes, and the mistake everyone makes

Performance across, potential up, nine boxes. Everyone knows the grid; almost everyone scores the second axis wrong. Performance is about the role the person has — results against the key results they own this quarter. Potential is about the role they do not have yet: the three unteachable behavioural competencies from the Competency Model — strategic thinking, building effective relationships, bias for action — read against the demands of the next role, in the weights that role needs. A high performer is not automatically high potential, and the grid has a box, the trusted professional, precisely for the expert who is exactly where they should be and should never be promoted into misery. Score performance from the numbers and potential from the behaviours, and the instrument joins Objectives and Key Results on one side to the Competency Model on the other.

A placement is an instruction

Every box carries a move, and the move is the point. Top right: invest — strategic initiatives, named successors, pay ahead of the market before the market asks. The diagonal: selectively invest — training for the core, respect and expert pay for the professional, a decision date for the new hire nobody can read yet. Bottom left: the conversations that are overdue, with a clock on them. The grid is also a budget, and the pattern of the budget is a diagonal, not a ladder. Growth should be predictable: a person should be able to see their next quarter and their next year from their own placement, and the most honest career conversation most managers will ever have takes five minutes, because the picture does the talking.

Why fifteen minutes

The review is fast because the scoring is done before it and the conversations are done after it. Managers score alone, from the quarter's results and the competencies; the meeting reads the grid aloud, argues only the disagreements — which are always about potential, and always resolve into "which role, and which competency?" — and leaves with one move per person, written. The crucial conversations happen within two weeks. Then the quarter runs, and the grid is drawn again, and people should have moved: up as they grow, across as they are challenged, out of the bottom left one way or the other. A grid that looks the same two quarters running is a review that did not happen.

Ten pages, free to use with attribution, with a roster that computes the box and a grid that counts the team. The names in it are invented. The method is nine years old and has not needed to change.