Free 9 Box Grid Template Excel: Rate, Plot, Act

See your whole team on one page, and know what to do about each of them

Every manager has a rough sense of who is thriving, who is coasting, and who is in the wrong job. That sense stays in their head, differs from the manager next door, and turns into an argument the moment promotions come up.

This free 9 box grid template gets it on paper. The nine box grid is a talent review tool that plots how someone performs in the job they hold today against how far they could go in a bigger one. You answer two questions about each person, and everyone lands in one of nine boxes that each suggest a different thing to do.

It is built for people who have never run a talent review before. No jargon, no consulting framework, no training required. Add your team, answer two drop-down questions each, and the 9 box grid builds itself.

Who this 9 box grid template is for

Managers asked to rate their team before a talent review and unsure what the boxes actually mean
HR leaders running a talent calibration cycle for the first time
Founders and small business owners who want a structured read on their team without buying software
People teams building a succession plan who need to find the bench before they can plan for it
L&D teams deciding where a limited development budget should go

If you already run talent reviews on a platform, this template still works as a manager-level worksheet before calibration.

What's inside the 9 box grid template:

Two Plain-English Questions

No performance ratings, no potential scores, no HR vocabulary. Just “how are they doing in this job?” and “how much further could they go?”, with three answers each. Anyone can fill it in without being briefed first.

Ratings your managers won't argue about

Ask ten managers to score “potential” and you get ten definitions. This template never uses the word. It asks how someone is doing in the job they have, and how much further they could go, three answers each. The questions are specific enough that two managers looking at the same person tend to land in the same place, which is the whole point of a talent review.

Boxes that tell you what to do, not what to call it

Knowing someone is a “Rough Diamond” changes nothing on Monday. So the boxes are named for the situation, Ready for more, In the wrong seat, Not clicking yet, and each carries a specific action: give them something bigger to run now, work out what is in the way, keep them and stop measuring them against a promotion they never wanted. The traditional labels are there in a side column for anyone who needs them for a board pack.

Worked Examples Included

Five people already rated across five different boxes, so you can see how the grid behaves before you touch it. Type straight over them.

One rating scale, however many managers

Multi-manager reviews fall apart when someone invents their own wording halfway down the sheet. Both answers come from a fixed list, so the counts stay honest and calibration starts from a shared vocabulary rather than a translation exercise.