Managing People
The Real 9-Box
by Dallas Lynn
The 9-box model is a well known management tool to help managers categorize employees into one of nine boxes along performance and potential axes. Managers are used to thinking inside the box and an accurate categorization would be very useful to an organization for succession planning, retention, and compensation, the 9-box model as typically constructed is subject to several well-founded criticisms, viz.
- There is no empirical evidence the average manager can accurately categorize the potential of their reports.
- Potential itself is highly contextual yet the 9-box model doesn't differentiate innate potential from how motivated an employee is to work for the manager boxing them.
- Most organizations aren't brave enough to assign boxes publicly, making them inactionable for the employee at best.
In our extensive research we've found that these problems would not be intractable, if the boxes were correctly labelled. We now propose an improved version of the 9-box matrix that avoids the conceptual confusion inherent by replacing the aspirational categories with the ones actually observed in the workplace.
A quick refresher on the traditional 9-box system:
And here are the empirically correct labellings determined by research:
The boxes and their uses:
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Box 1 - People Who Remind You of Yourself
These are employees that remind the leader of themselves; the best kind of employees. After all, if the qualities of the leader were not worthy of imitation, then someone else would be doing the succession planning.
Action Plan:- Bask in the reflected glory of your surrogate genes.
- Marvel at your own greatness
- Lament that only not being able to clone yourself keeps the firm from its highest level of achievement.
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Box 2 - Highly Competent Irrational Economic Actors
These are employees that are good performers and also bless the company with emotional issues that make them prone to being fundamentally irrational economic actors. These include but are not limited to naive youngsters who think hard work is rewarded proportionately; people craving the approval of a parental figure they can transfer to the leader; and those with pathological needs to meet expectations, no matter how onerous.
Action Plan:- Pile increasing levels of work on until you find their physical breaking point
- Encourage health plans that have high mental health deductibles.
- Transfer or promote to another org if they show signs of discovering healthy boundaries.
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Box 3 - Competent People with Warped Ideologies
These employees are similar to box 2 employees but less valuable because they labor under a less permanent form of mental damage like libertarianism or imposter syndrone.
Action Plan:- Pile increasing levels of work on until you find their physical breaking point
- Be particularly mindful of any changes in attitude
- Always encourage the bad ideas that lead to them working harder for no material reward
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Box 4 - Your Nepo Hires
Your nepotism hires. Someone who shares DNA with you is both likely to share in at least some of your extraordinary qualties (see Box 1), as well as being someone that you can abuse more than a normal employee, since they are more likely to seek unofficial channels of redress and harbor a greater sense of loyalty and gratefulness that you can turn to advantage.
Action Plan:- Use their personal contact info to harass after hours to extract more productivity
- Denigrate their qualifications so they don't seek equivalent employement elsewhere
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Box 5 - True Believers
True believers are those who who have been conned or otherwise pulled the wool over their own eyes in such a way that they believe the mission of the company is other than enriching and aggrandizing leadership. These are a valuable core, but generally too limited in their ability to accurately observe and react to the world to be top performers.
Action Plan:- Make they receive company branded merch
- Emphasize that people should join the company not to maximize compensation but for nobler ends
- Minimal raises
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Box 6 - Long-Tenured Employees
Longer tenured employees have the advantage of institutional knowledge which can make them moderate performers, but it comes at the high price of providing annoying context when you're trying to be visionary and transformative; that their successes don't reflect as highly on you if you didn't hire them; and if they were truly any good they wouldn't be longer-tenured yet still reporting to you, would they?
Action Plan:- Put on legacy or low priority projects to minimize the impact of any success they might have.
- Consistently emphasize 'raising the hiring bar' to subtly cast aspersions on anyone prior to your tenure
- Cancel or undermine anything that might move the needle on the business that you won't get credit for
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Box 7 - Your Betters
Your betters. The first of the 3 boxes marking the worst kind of employees, the ones that are difficult to exploit. Hard as it is to accept, some people are smarter, taller, more attractive, better at sycophancy, higher on the sociopathy index or otherwise possessed of more of the attributes that select for success in the modern workplace. Steve Jobs famously said 'A players hire A players, and B players hire C players' but it's lesser known that his actual plan was for everyone to believe they were A-players and thus hire people they had to compete with, keeping his own position safe while he replaced himself with a boring supply chain guy. Take his advice and purge threatening A-players.
Action Plan:- Falsely praise the virtues of modesty, being the 'salt of the earth' and 'common sense'
- If younger than you, reiterate often the importance of the lessons of experience
- If older than you, reiterate often the evils of stagnation and the merits of emerging methods and technologies
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Box 8 - Other People's Nepo Hires
Your nepo hires are competent and just needed a leg up to show their true potential and are more accountable and loyal to you personally. Other people's nepo hires are untrustworthy incompetents who are also harder to get rid of by normal channels. Their one advantage in modern 'no blame' cultures (ie. implicit blame cultures) is that scapegoating the highest ranking nepo baby in the org is a great way to resolve an issue with no consequences to anyone.
Action Plan:- Use those who can't reasonably be punished as blame sponges
- Praise their relatives
- Try to cultivate personal gossip you can use
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Box 9 - Personally Fulfilled Individuals
People with a strong sense of personal fulfillment outside of work or independent means are the most dangerous employees and should be purged from any organization as quickly as possible. They are prone to questioning your decisions, not being obsequious enough, and having fulfilling lives outside of work that detract from enriching you. Truly degenerate cases won't make haste to accomplish a task when the person asking them says it's something you personally want or be honored at any personal attention you bestow on their work.
Action Plan:- PIP / Terminate
- Transfer