Looking for Talent Professionals to share your experiences about 9box management. Do you have an ideal distribution? 

The "ideal" distribution depends on the rate of growth of the business/function/dept that you are looking at.

I'll use business/function/dept interchangeably below.

If you are looking at a business where there is RAPID GROWTH, you'll need more people in the higher potential and higher performance group to fill the talent "vacuum" that will be created when your demand for talent outstrips supply. (about 25% in the high performance, medium and high potential blocks)

If you are looking at a function that is RELATIVELY STABLE, you'll only need to deal with natural attrition and turnover. (about 15% in the high performance, medium and high potential blocks)

If you are looking at a department where a lot of processes are been automated, resulting in NEGATIVE GROWTH (downsizing) then you'll only need about 5% in the high performance, medium and high potential blocks. In this case you want to identify deployment opportunities for excess people in these blocks.

Another way to think about it is: "Would we be able to find opportunities for all our high potentials  in the next 12 months ?"

To answer that question you need know how fast high potentials usually get promoted. It's about every 2.5 years.

So the Number of promotions per year = Total high potentials/Promotion interval in years

As an example, 

- Total high potentials = 100
- Promotion interval = 2.5 years

So, 100/2.5 = 40

Therefore, 40 high potentials will be probably be promoted in the next 12 months. Will you be able to accommodate them?

We don't focus on an ideal distribution as we leverage the 9-box across the organisation and a forced or encouraged distribution may not work where there are smaller groups of direct reports. Instead, we define the 9-box categories as clearly as we can and challenge/discuss ratings at different levels i.e. HRBP with leader, HRD with senior leaders, CHRO and President with the most senior talent. These conversations are more impactful as we can discuss expectations as well as the reason for a rating and include distribution as well as individual ratings in these discussions. 

What's important in my opinion is recognizing that box 5 i.e. mid potential and mid performance is a good place to be and that box 9 i.e. high potential and high performance should reflect someone ready now for their next role and therefore this person should not stay in this category in the long term as we have a retention risk if that's the case. 

Yes, here is our suggestion: When considering the distribution of your performance ratings amongst your team, keep in mind that ~20% should be As, ~70% should be Bs and ~10% should be rated as Cs. suggest our leaders distribute their ratings during our calibration process 

Normally I consider:
Box 9 = 10%
Boxes 6, 7 and 8 = 30%
Boxes 0, 3, 4 and 5 = 50%
Boxes 1 and 2 = 10%

We don't use 9 Box in my current organisation. When I used it elsewhere, it was quite typical to find 50% of names in Boxes 1, 2 and 3 - when our objective was to have at most 20% in those same boxes. After a half-day's discussion (by team, typically), where the leader expected evidence for box placement, we could re-assign names and arrive at that. We didn't have a strict expectation for percentages within each of Boxes 1, 2 and 3 - although it was more likely to have the fewest in Box 1. 

I would say that the box for high potential, low performance should probably be omitted - it just doesn't make sense in practical terms.