You are a respected mid-level leader. Your teams have performed well. You’ve managed the diverse personalities and styles of your team members gracefully. You’ve encouraged and facilitated individual development and you’ve even helped a few folks get promoted.
Now you are brought into your organization’s massive talent evaluation and succession planning initiative. Maybe it’s your first time. Maybe you’re more familiar with the drill. Either way, you sit right at the crossroads of a very consequential moment for yourself, and especially for your team members. How you navigate this process will say a lot about your integrity as a leader.
The 9-Box matrix is a widely used tool for consistent assessment of employee potential, but there are others. Essentially, these tools help the organization develop a common platform for comparing the current performance and future potential of all employees at all levels of the organization. The 9-Box is widely accepted across organizations as the standard methodology for identifying bench strength, gaps, and developing the succession roadmap. It is efficient. Not always effective.
These tools are normally completed as follows. Performance metrics and annual performance evaluations feed the content of the matrix. Each manager populates the matrix by plotting their team members on the matrix according to current performance and future potential for promotion. Matrices from peer managers in each department are merged in order to give management 1 to 2 levels above a picture of the entire department. This continues upward throughout the organization to the CEO.
Once all the employees are rated, the team leader may meet with their peers and their 1-up and 2-up managers to debrief the ratings. This process also continues upward in the organization. In each round of these meetings, a few dozen leaders of different levels may participate. The employee’s strengths and weaknesses are presented by the manager to the group and others are invited to provide their first hand observations of the employee, good and bad. Following the discussion, the leader’s rating is either validated or challenged. The group agrees on a final rating and moves to the next employee. Since there is usually a large number of employees to be covered, the group only focuses on top performers, employees with high potential, and employees who currently score poorly on both measures. The vast majority of employees are not discussed.
There are a number of flaws with this methodology. Both for you the leader and definitely for your employees. There are even problems for the company. Let’s discuss a few of these.
First, for you the leader, there can be an underweighting of your perspective as the employee’s supervisor. You arguably know her best. You work closely with her, have regular interactions, travel together on sales calls. You’ve developed mutually agreed upon goals and have been a supportive manager in helping her achieve those. Your development plan for her takes into consideration everything you know about her interests, her performance, her aspirations and potential.
Now, you have 3-5 minutes to articulate your assessment of her to the group. You do that reasonably well. Nobody has reviewed any background information about your employee, and 80% of the people in the room don’t know her. Now you invite input. You begin to get anecdotal “evidence” from others in the room. One person worked closely on a project with her. There was that time at the sales meeting when she missed a session (perhaps for a good reason). Somebody had dinner with her once. There are other inputs. What happens in this environment can be stunning. These inputs tend to get equal weighting to the assessment you spent hours on, to your entire understanding of her value as an employee. In fact, because these inputs may come from people who are senior to you, they may get heavier weighting. Unless you can regain control of the discussion and perspective, your employee’s future may be in jeopardy. Your authority as a talent evaluator may come into question.
Second, for your employee, the process is usually very opaque. You’ve probably been asked to keep your assessment confidential until after the leadership teams can review all the employees. So, the discussions that take place are really happening behind a dark curtain from the employee’s perspective. Following the ratings, you may also be limited in what you share with the employee, based on your company’s guidance on that. Unless there is a specific follow up, such as working to exit an employee from the company, or discussion of a specific new assignment, or a specific development recommendation, there will probably be little transparency for the employee on how they were assessed and discussed. This goes against most of the principles you are trying to follow as a modern compassionate leader, which is to place your cards on the table and foster transparency with your team. It has the potential to undermine your employee relationships.
Finally, the company is often poorly served by the 9-Box process. The virtues of this methodology are that the rating system is in a uniform format and easy to quickly understand. The company can also understand metrics describing the strength of the bench and perhaps the ability of leaders to hire and develop people. But there are pitfalls. Since 80% of the people in the debrief groups don’t have first-hand knowledge of the employee, they have to rely on resumes, performance ratings, and the manager’s assessment. Most do not review these before the discussion, so there is only a superficial familiarity for each employee discussed. And zero for those not discussed. Nuances about any single individual are lost. Personal anecdotes and stories rule the day here. Lasting associations are made. Like it or not, the employee is branded, good or bad, and that is likely to become her permanent brand identity across the company’s leaders.
For this reason, the company may miss the diamond in the rough. The employee who is making a comeback. It may miss the employee who has talent, but may work for a manager with a blind spot or particular bias. It misses the essence of the employee and never identifies her true potential. Management watches employees leave the company and frets over why that is happening.
It’s up to you, the rising leader, to make sure your employee gets a fair shake. A true assessment. Your most important job as a manager is to hire and develop great people and facilitate their career growth. It is to help your organization succeed by doing that well.
Don’t let the succession planning process undermine your good work as a compassionate leader. Be aware of the shortcomings and pitfalls of your company’s process and stand up to them. Insist on an appropriate level of transparency. Make sure your team members understand the platform that is being utilized to evaluate them for future growth. Help them build personal development strategies against that system. Qualify inputs you receive from peers and leaders senior to you. Establish your credibility as the person with the best vantage point of your employee. Don’t let anecdotes rule the day and trump your leadership.
Keep both hands on the wheel as you navigate your company’s succession planning cycle. You’ll be helping your high potential employee, your company and yourself to win.
Lead well.
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