Talent Reviews & Succession Planning: Nine-Box Grids, Bench Strength, Readiness & Flight Risk

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn twelve performance and potential ratings into nine-box codes and segments, count the people in every box with COUNTIFS and work out the share of top talent.
• Compare the actual rating distribution with a fictional guideline in percentage points and find the manager whose average rating sits furthest above the group.
• Score eight roles on impact, scarcity and vacancy risk with SUMPRODUCT, rank them with RANK.EQ, flag the critical ones and count them.
• Count successors per critical role by readiness, turn them into a weighted bench score, flag roles without a ready-now successor and measure the bench coverage of the whole slate.
• Turn three job-related signals into points with an approximate XLOOKUP and IFS, combine them into a weighted flight-risk score and assign Low, Medium or High bands.
• Convert fictional annual exit probabilities into three-year vacancy probabilities, add up expected vacancies with SUMPRODUCT and compare them with the internal fill capacity of the bench.
• Date every development action with EDATE, measure each successor's completion rate, move readiness up one step where the plan is on track and count the open actions that are past due.
• Build the one-page summary for the leadership team: bench strength per function and in total, the internal fill rate of past critical vacancies and a column chart of critical roles vs covered roles.