The Nine-Box Grid Has No Away Fixtures

What the World Cup Exposes About Your Talent System | Part Two (read Part One: Messi and Ronaldo Were HiPo Once, Too)

Is Your Top Talent World Class, or Just Home Form?

Every country at this World Cup did the same thing. It picked the players who dominate at home and put them on the plane.

Then the games started, and some of those teams learned something uncomfortable. Their best was ordinary against the real standard. Stars at home, passengers on the world stage.

Your talent system does exactly the same thing, and rarely notices.

The Nine-Box Grid Scores Everyone at Home

Many organisations rank their people on a grid, the famous nine-box grid. Performance on one axis, potential on the other, nine boxes in all.

The names in the top corner are your stars: high performers with high potential. It feels rigorous and it produces a tidy picture. It also has a blind spot the World Cup makes obvious.

The nine-box grid has no away fixtures.

Both axes are scored against your own world. Performance is measured against your targets. Potential is judged against your idea of what good looks like here. So a top-box star is a star in your league.

The grid never asks the harder question: how good are they against the best outside your walls?

Not Every Role Plays Away

Plenty of jobs only ever compete at home, and for those, best in the building is exactly what you need. The risk starts with roles that face the market — the ones where your person is tested directly against competitors, customers and the best talent you could otherwise hire.

Commercial leadership. Product. Deal-making. Your scarce technical people. The critical roles you are planning succession into.

For those market-facing roles, an internal rating is a home result. It tells you who would start for your team. It says nothing about whether they would start for a better one.

Run an Away Fixture Before You Decide

Before you promote or build a succession plan around your top-box names, ask three questions.

1. Against whom is this person actually competing? Not the colleague in the next box. The competitor across town and the candidate you could hire instead.
2. Have we ever measured them against that standard, or only against ourselves?
3. If they walked into our toughest competitor tomorrow, would they start, sit on the bench, or get cut?

That last question changes the conversation.

Don’t Over-Correct: Benchmark the Roles That Face the Market

One caution before you over-correct. The point is not to benchmark every seat against some imagined superstar. That is how organisations end up chasing a mythical ideal candidate, passing over good people, and narrowing their talent for no commercial gain.

Benchmark the roles that face the market. Leave the rest alone.

Home Form, or World Class?

Your nine-box grid tells you who is best in the building. It is silent on who would make the away squad. For the roles that compete in the open market, that silence is a risk you are carrying without pricing it.

So look at your top box and ask, honestly: home form, or world class?

Next in the series: Every country sends its best eleven, and the best eleven still loses. Picking stars is not the same as building a team.

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Justin Miles

Manager Partner, Melbourne at Generator Talent

Justin is the Managing Partner of our Melbourne office, an outcome focused leader with a track record of driving business performance through proven talent and organisation development practices. Justin’s methods and skills have been shaped by working with performance oriented leaders in great companies including PepsiCo, The Campbell Soup Company, Diageo, Rip Curl, Fonterra and Wesfarmers, in Australia, the USA and Latin America.