Issue 4: How a 9Box Changed Everything

HRBP Activate 

A very exciting moment for HR Business Partners is when something clicks. It might come from hard work, dedication, study, or sometimes pure luck. Whatever the trigger, there is a point where we realize how powerful this role really is. When we are trained well and think in the right way, we can make a real, visible impact on the business.

I sometimes call that moment “HRBP activation.” It is one of the most fulfilling and reassuring parts of this work. You suddenly see how uniquely qualified you are to make an observation or recommendation that no one else in the room could have made. I want that moment for every single one of you, and not just once. I want you to experience it over and over again.

The challenge is that most of us are never actually taught what influence looks like in practice. People tell you that you are “strategic,” that you have “a seat at the table,” that you are “a partner.” None of it feels real until the business sees your impact and responds to it. Until then, those phrases sound more like lines from a script than a reflection of what the role can really do.

In the meantime, we tend to hang on to the smaller wins. We help negotiate a critical offer. We prep a manager on how to talk to a struggling employee and see that person get back on track. Our primary client leader sends a thank-you note and copies their team for helping close the performance cycle on time, on budget, and with better conversations. All of that is good work and it does matter. It shows we are helping.

But that is not activation.

Activation is when the work we do changes how leaders see the business, their teams, or themselves. It is when insight shifts a decision, exposes a pattern no one else noticed, protects people from a bad call, or unlocks performance that has been stuck for years.

The kind of impact this role can have on the success of an organization is profound. Hearing and sharing those stories is one of my favorite parts of this job, because they prove what I deeply believe: when an HRBP truly activates, the business cannot imagine operating without them

A 9-Box Exercise Changed Everything

One of my favorite moments of true HRBP activation happened at a tech company where I partnered with the engineering organization responsible for our primary product. The org was made up mostly of engineers, with design, product, research, and operations teams woven in. Coming from a sales and marketing background, this was a completely different world for me. They communicated differently. They processed information differently. And it took time before I felt they genuinely trusted me instead of being polite because HR was in the room.

Having to both think in terms of product and engineering was an interesting challenge, their problems were very different than I was used to, their approach was the opposite of what I had been accustomed to and their mindset was something that took me months to learn.

Over the eight months leading up to this moment, I had taken some intentional steps to build credibility, (which I’ll share in Issue 5). But one of the reasons I had been hired in the first place was because I had been on the team that removed numeric ratings from performance management at my previous company. That process was chaotic, painful, and complicated, but it also taught me how much more valuable real conversations were than a forced bell curve. (And yes, the bell curve distribution truly is absurd.)

This company had a flexible mindset around performance.

The guidance was essentially: HRBPs and the leadership team can choose whatever performance process works for their org, as long as the work gets done. Ratings, pass/fail, 9-box, or something else entirely. Do the work and stand behind the outcomes.

About a month before the performance cycle began, I realized something important. My predecessor, who had only been an HRBP for two years supporting Finance, didn’t have the experience or confidence to challenge this particular executive. For the sake of ease we will call him Roger. He had been one of the first employees and operated with the combined authority of a technical founder and product visionary. He also came from a culture that approached hierarchy and communication very differently, and it was clear he saw me through the classic Steve Jobs lens: “I’ve never met an HR person who is better than okay.” Necessary, but not impressive.

He and I had already navigated a few tense exchanges and I saw we both surprised each other at times. He mentioned to me that I asked a lot of questions and he found that annoying sometimes but also appreciated sincere curiosity. I responded that I found his communication unnecessarily insufferable sometimes but I could appreciate his methodology of thinking. That earned me my first chuckle.

Roger was the textbook engineer. Smart, introspective, system level thinking and he approached everything in work with a mindset I really admired. "How do we make this better? How do we make this easier? How do we improve upon perfection? How can we do this better than before?" and while his mind was brilliant, his personality didn't always translate - and as such as he could come off as abrupt, cold, or dismissive and it was very clear when he was doing something that he considered "silly nonsense" vs "real work" and as we started to get to know each other better and form a relationship, the annual appraisal cycle began and I saw a huge issue - that was also an opportunity.

Since the company allowed each business unit to pick its own process, and because my predecessor didn’t know how to push back, the performance management cycle had devolved into something extremely basic. Everyone submitted ratings on a 2–5 scale. Someone compiled them into a spreadsheet. Roger met with his directs. They agreed on who needed more money. And that was it.

The Organization

To understand what happened next, it helps to understand the structure.

Roger was both the head of product and technology and there were two mirrored sides of the product.

• Each side had a Senior Director or VP of Engineering, Product, and Design.
• Research and Data reported directly to the CTO/CPO but supported both sides.
• Operations and Project Management were embedded within each product and did not cross sides
• Then there was me, the Director of HRBP, and the Director of Finance that were the core partners

There were about 450 employees, mostly in the US. The org was roughly:

• 66% Engineering
• 14% Product
• 7% Research
• 6% Data
• 4% Operations
• 3% Design

It was a highly technical, highly specialized workforce. But for all their sophistication, they had never done a real, cross-functional calibration. The versions they had previously completed were quick, surface-level, and tightly siloed within each function.

The Setup

It had taken me two months to get into my first executive team meeting. And over the months I had onboarded I mostly listened and asked questions. But as the annual review loomed on the horizon, I sent a note to the Ops Lead who ran the weekly leadership exec meeting that I would be talking about performance management. I gave a 20-minute overview of what a proper performance review and calibration could look like and how valuable it could be for this business.

To do it well, I told them, we needed time and engagement. Five dedicated days.

• One full day for engineering
• Separate sessions for product, design, research, operations, and project management
• A session for the Directors across all functions
• A session for the VPs of the mirrored units
• And a final day with the executive team.

They pushed back immediately, especially engineering. They were preparing for several releases and everyone was heads down and focused and I said, “Your employees are just as important. You cannot deliver your product without them, and they deserve your attention.”

This was a rare moment where Roger and I were aligned. He thought for a few moments and eventually nodded and told the Ops Manager to rearrange the release schedule. He still wasn’t fully convinced, but he was listening. And that was enough to get started.

The Purpose of the 9-Box

For anyone who hasn’t used it before, the purpose of the 9-box is not to rate people. Even though it looks like a rating system, and even though it often shows up right when a company is trying to move away from ratings, the 9-box is not giving anyone a score. What it really does is capture a moment in time. It shows how someone is performing today and how much potential they seem to have for the future. That is all. There are no permanent labels, no long-term judgments, and nothing that gets etched into a file forever. It is simply a snapshot that helps start the right conversations.

I am very much on the side of believing the 9-box is an outdated tool, especially because “potential” is a word that gets interpreted in wildly different ways. But when I ran this exercise a few years ago, it was the right tool for that specific moment and for that business.

The real value is never the picture of the boxes. The value is the discussion it forces people to have. When you place someone in a specific box, you have to explain why. What examples support it. What patterns you’ve actually seen. Where this person shines and where they struggle. What they might grow into if given the right support or opportunities. The 9-box gives people a simple shared language to talk about talent, and when it’s used well, it can take you far deeper than any rating system ever could.

The Importance of "Calibration"

When I think back to my early years as an HRBP, I assumed calibration meant sitting quietly while the leaders talked. I asked a few questions, took notes, and tried not to slow anything down. I know a lot of new HRBPs start the same way. We expect the leaders to drive the conversation, and we see ourselves as facilitators who make the meeting run smoothly.

But the role changes completely once you understand what calibration can actually do. And it changes even more once you activate as an HRBP. You stop reacting in the moment because you already know what is going to happen in the room. You know your leaders well enough to anticipate the dynamics, the hesitation, the disagreements, and even the alliances. You walk in prepared.

You know who tends to hold back, even though they have the most impactful insights. You create space for them before they convince themselves to stay quiet. You know who tends to dominate, so you plan how to keep the conversation balanced. You know which leaders will challenge each other, which ones will agree too quickly, and which ones shut down when the discussion gets uncomfortable. You shape the environment in a way that uses these tendencies to make the conversation stronger instead of harder. You understand who is frustrated, who is losing engagement, and why, and you’ve already coached the VP on how to navigate it.

This is where bias becomes a central part of calibration. Everyone brings bias into the room. Bias is not something we remove. It is something we identify, understand, and account for. A strong HRBP recognizes how bias shows up in loud and quiet ways. Maybe someone prefers a communication style and confuses it with effectiveness. Maybe someone is loyal to a long-term employee. Maybe personal chemistry, admiration, or irritation is influencing the assessment more than anyone realizes. Sometimes a single memorable moment has shaped an entire perception of performance.

Our job is not to judge these biases. Most of the time we simply acknowledge them. We help leaders slow down and look at what is actually driving their assessment. When someone says, “I just really trust her,” or “he rubs me the wrong way,” or “everyone likes working with them,” we help them dig deeper. We guide the shift from impressions to real examples. We help leaders see the difference between personality and performance, comfort and capability, preference and dependable delivery.

This is where the 9-box becomes genuinely useful. It forces people to articulate why they see someone where they do. When you know the organization, the expectations of the role, and what good looks like across levels and functions, you know how to pressure test the conversation without sounding confrontational. You ask the questions that reveal whether the placement is grounded in evidence or shaped by assumptions. And you’re not doing it to catch anyone. You’re doing it so leaders can be more honest with themselves. And what makes this more fun? Now you have to calibrate those values among many individuals who may approach things differently - this is the real HRBP stuff.

A strong HRBP does not simply guide calibration. We drive it with intention. We help leaders explore bias without shame or defensiveness, we know this organization, sometimes better than they do because while they are immersed in the day to day, while we are observing and watching and guiding them from 500 feet above and we see how all of these teams are interacting, building, designing and creating things at scale, we can provide unique positioning and insights that no other role can. We can help separate the personal from the professional and how impacts and value can be measured and in several different perspective. We know how and when to bring in the most sensitive and delicate of topics and we've already coached the associated people so they finally take time to listen to each other. We make sure the examples are real, the feedback is grounded, and the insights actually lead somewhere.

Preparation

Two weeks before the calibration, I sent each team lead a slide deck, instructions, and a blank 9-box. I asked them to place each employee on their teams using the standard definitions of performance and potential, along with a few examples I had tailored to their job families. I asked them to send everything back to me so I could assemble the full picture. As we got closer to the calibration dates, I also set some ground rules to make sure we were operating with clarity and fairness.

I told them the following:

• Saying someone is “super smart” is not real feedback and will be discounted.
• Saying someone “works nights and weekends” is not meaningful and can actually be a sign of poor prioritization.
• Saying “everyone likes working with them” is not evidence of performance or potential.
• No dog-piling. Once a rating is determined, there is no need for additional anecdotes to prove the point.
• Anyone with less than six months in the company was marked TNTR (Too New to Rate). The same applied to anyone who had just moved into a new role with less than three months in it.
• Open debate was not only allowed but encouraged.

I got a handful of questions as the leaders dug into their assessments, and I clarified things when needed. What I appreciated was how curious and engaged they became as the process went on. They were thinking differently. They were taking the exercise seriously.

By the time the first calibration day arrived, the last leader had sent me her fourth revision only thirty minutes before the meeting. When I pulled all the information together, we were ready.

HRBP Activation: The Turning Point

At first, the room was quiet. Eleven engineering directors sat politely while I reminded them how important their teams were. The VP of Engineering added a short comment of support, and then we began. I deliberately started with one of the strongest presenters so the others could see how the process worked and feel more comfortable participating.

The first part went smoothly. Confident presentation, clear examples, no real tension. But when he got to his last four employees who were assigned to our primary product, everything shifted.

A Director of Machine Learning Engineering, who had joined about seven months earlier, disagreed with the placement of one of his Data Engineers. She started off polite but firm, pointing out several gaps this engineer had shown during a major release. Those gaps had caused moderate issues in our live product for a few hours, and she believed this mattered. Not only did she argue that he should not be in the 9 box, she pushed back on the idea of placing him in the 6 box as well. That opened the door to a twenty-minute debate about whether he belonged in 8 or in 5.

What began as a polished, diplomatic exchange quickly turned into real debate in the best way possible:

• He argued that the engineer had always been a high performer.
• She argued that if consistency matters, her point was even stronger
• He emphasized past excellence
• She emphasized accountability and risk, why were we rewarding someone for the past?

He leaned on trust. She leaned on evidence.

At one point, he looked at the VP with an expression that basically said, “This is cute, but there’s no way I’m giving this all-star a 5.” But the VP’s face told a different story. He was intrigued. As an engineer, he finally saw a people problem worth solving: how do you quantify something subjective like performance with objective criteria and then do the same for potential?

What I had hoped for was open discussion. What we got was more than that. It grew chaotic at times, and we had to reset the room more than once. Eventually, the entire engineering leadership team agreed they needed a dedicated second day. There were too many questions and too many interpretations. They threw out hypotheticals. They challenged assumptions. They tested the very structure of the 9-box. And they found the flaws, then immediately began building solutions.

By the end of the day, we had only made it through five of the eleven product teams. But the Slack channel lit up for hours that night with ideas, suggestions, and optimizations.

And I did something many HRBPs never think to do: I let them take the framework and shape it in their own language. This was an engineering culture. These were people who understood systems and patterns better than most. Why wouldn’t I tap into that?

The next morning, they came back with refinements. A formula to estimate time spent per employee. A method to prioritize which employees we needed to discuss. An informal “9-box within the 9-box” for nuance. Clearer criteria for performance. Clearer indicators for potential. The structure was still mine, but the system was now ours.

People who had previously been polite but distant were now fully engaged. They challenged me. I challenged them. They taught me the technical side in plain language so I could follow. I gave them perspective from the talent side, but then against 3 perspectives and different job family competencies. It was the first time I felt the partnership click into place at this organization. The discussions were so lively and fascinating - it was like they were seeing me for the first time - I wasn't just their "HR" guy, but someone who was with them and wanted what was best for their team. This meant pointing out inconsistencies, preferences, biases and impossible questions - and the challenges they laid out for me were extraordinary. I don't think I'd ever had my brain challenged in such a way in a long time, and I had never had so much fun at work.

As we reached the eleventh product and the final slide, already an hour and a half past our scheduled end time, I couldn’t help but smile. They were having real conversations. They were reconsidering long-held assumptions. They were speaking openly about strengths and gaps across teams. Engineers rotated between products, so no one had ever seen the full picture until they were in that room together. Now they finally had it. I could literally FEEL the changes in their perspectives as they began to think, process, articulate and analyze performance.

And while that in itself was a fantastic victory, I had no idea that the best was still yet to come.

How Slide 9 Changed Everything

We had to rearrange schedules to make everything work, but we eventually made it through the engineering, product, design, and research teams that week. We then pushed the executive team calibration to the following week so I could review everything and put together the deck over the weekend.

That delay ended up being one of the best things that could have happened.

I had never worked in an organization structured quite like this one. Because the product was essentially a digital app, this org functioned as the R&D engine. As I put together the final deck over Sunday breakfast in my apartment, I was struck with an idea. I had seen in Workday that each employee was assigned to a specific product. On a whim, I texted the ops director to confirm if that was accurate and she responded that for the most part, yes It was. It was easy to take the data we had built during calibration and now add another modifier against product - something I hadn't ever had the chance to do before. Once I saw how revealing that was, I added more views. Job family. Location. Specialty. Title. What started as a predictable distribution suddenly showed patterns I couldn’t ignore.

My original executive deck had been 8 pages. Clean. Straightforward. A few notable observations and recommendations

But the updated version I compiled over the weekend was 32 pages. Once I started to see what I saw, and confirmed it several times, I couldn't wait to show the executive team.

We met together as a group on Tuesday morning and I smiled and felt warm at their compliments from the week before and how fascinating and effective everyone found it. plugged my laptop into the projector and began a standard calibration debrief and started with a generally expected slide that showed the majority of the department was rated well.

It basically looked something like this

After we did each department, and I could almost feel them starting to "wrap up", I eagerly went to slide 9 and said "I decided to try cut the data in a few different ways, and I found some rather interesting things you'd want to see"

And I went to Slide 9. "Distribution by Gender":

The room went completely quiet. I didn’t have to say anything. The department did lean male, but this was not even close to what the expected distribution should have been. The seven men on the executive team looked confused. The three women looked resigned, which told its own story. Before anyone could ask, I clarified that, yes, some teams were female-heavy, like Research, but that wasn’t what was driving the imbalance. The issue was overwhelmingly in engineering.

We kept moving and I showed the ethnicity distribution next.

(note: original slide has breakdown of 5 ethnicities, all non-Caucasian were grouped together for visual impact)

The reaction was very similar. Another skew that wasn’t explained by team size or org structure.

Then we got to the slide that broke the tension completely: the distribution for our most important product. This was the app that drove our revenue, our brand, and our market identity. And the distribution was not what you'd think it was.

Most employees supporting this product were in the 5 box. Not a single person was in the 9 box. A small number were in 8 and 6. And, shockingly, this product had two employees sitting in box 1. Meanwhile, one of our smallest products, which represented less than ten percent of our revenue, was staffed almost exclusively with high performers and high potential talent.

Roger cursed under his breath. A few VPs laughed in disbelief. One of the Design leaders muttered, “That can’t be right.”

But it was right. And seeing it laid out this way made the truth unavoidable.

Surprisingly, there were no excuses and no defensiveness. They finally saw the cumulative impact of individual decisions that had always felt isolated. In sixty seconds they went from surprise, to acceptance, to concern.

We spent the next hour walking through possible explanations and sources of error. Subjective bias. Team size differences. Historical decisions. Pipeline issues. Organizational quirks. Anything that could soften the blow. But even after exploring every angle, three things were undeniable:

• The business unit was suffering from unaddressed sexism.
• The business unit was suffering from unaddressed racism.
• The business unit had made some concerning organizational design choices for our most important product.

Roger looked at me and gave me one of the best compliments of my career:

"Daniel, I mean no disrespect to your peers, but you are the first HR person Ive met who actually does the job of that silly title you have. Business Partner. I think I'm beginning to understand."

He turned to his team and said in his classic Roger way: "Folks. We have work to do."

The discussion that followed was honest, difficult, and constructive. No panic. No blame. Just a leadership team realizing that the way they had been operating needed to change.

And over the next several months, I watched them shift from “my team, my people, my needs” to “our team, our people, our needs.” Engineering leads started mentoring designers. Researchers started coaching product managers. We had very difficult conversations on sexism, racism, bias and discrimination. Leaders started supporting each other’s teams instead of competing quietly beneath the surface. The mindset change began at the top and spread throughout the organization.

Within six months we saw measurable progress. Within a year, the culture had moved in a healthier direction.

For me, this was one of the clearest demonstrations of what the HRBP role can actually do.

We will never build the product, sell the product, or market the product. We will never run the analytics or design the interface. But we can absolutely help people lead in ways that make all of that possible.

This is what HR does at its best - this is what an HRBP can do.

We give leaders a view they cannot see on their own. We connect patterns they are too close to notice. We put the right information in front of them at the right moment.

And if we do that well, they build something stronger than they would have without us.

~Dan

If you want the full documentation behind this story, it is available as a dedicated chapter in the HRBP Field Guide. That version includes some of the actual decks used, a detailed breakdown of the preparation work, the rules of engagement, the flow of conversations, the full 9-box assessments, and the post-calibration analysis. It also walks through the strategies we put in place to address the issues we uncovered, including the patterns related to sexism, racism, and the talent distribution across the product lines.

It is available for immediate purchase as part of the pre-sale. The content will be fully updated on December 7th, and anyone who purchases it before then will automatically receive the updated version at no extra cost.

If you want to take advantage of the pre-sale, you can visit this link here!

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Daniel Space is an HRBP Senior Consultant, Speaker, Author and Evangelist for the HR function. He has worked for more than 20 years for companies like WebMD, PwC, EA Games, Spotify, Epic and AMEX before becoming a consultant. In 2020 he created his "DanFromHR" personality on social media to dispel common myths and misunderstandings about corporate america and is currently focused on empowering the untapped potential HRBPs can have