Posted by on December 29, 2025.
I was having a conversation with a new potential customer about the high turnover rate in their sales organization. They are having a difficult time deciding bout whether they want hunter-type salespeople who are constantly looking for new business or the Market share preservation type of salesperson who is more service-oriented. Most conversations about Profiles PXT Select focus on hiring accuracy, reducing turnover, or matching people to roles. Those are important outcomes—but they’re also the obvious ones. What’s rarely discussed is one of PXT Select’s most powerful insights: it doesn’t just evaluate individuals, it quietly exposes where an organization’s systems,
expectations, and leadership assumptions are broken.
In Talent Management, we’re conditioned to treat performance issues as people problems. When someone struggles, the instinct is to coach harder, train more, or manage them out. Yet PXT Select consistently shows that many “underperformance” cases are actually role design failures or leadership misalignments, not capability gaps.
When Strong Talent Looks Like Poor Talent
One of the least examined uses of Profiles PXT Select is its ability to identify structural friction—situations where capable people are placed into environments that contradict how they’re wired to work.
Consider an employee with strong reasoning ability, a need for autonomy, and a preference for thoughtful decision-making. On paper, they look like high potential. But place them in a role that demands constant urgency, rigid processes, and transactional supervision, and performance drops. The assessment didn’t fail. The person didn’t fail. The system failed.
Also Read: Where AI Supports Leadership development and Where It Never Will
PXT Select reveals this misalignment early, but only if leaders are willing to look beyond individual scores and ask a harder question: Does this role actually exist the way we think it does?
The Myth of the “Ideal Profile”
Another rarely discussed insight from PXT Select is how often organizations chase an “ideal profile” that reflects leadership bias rather than real job success. Over time, many roles quietly morph into wish lists—assertive but collaborative, decisive but patient, detail-oriented but visionary.
Profiles PXT Select has a way of calling this bluff. When job patterns are created honestly and then compared to top performers, leaders are often surprised to discover that success doesn’t look the way they assumed. High performers may share motivations or behavioral traits that were never formally valued—or worse, were discouraged.
This is uncomfortable data. It forces organizations to confront whether they are actually rewarding the behaviors they say they want. That discomfort is exactly why this use of PXT Select is underutilized.
Talent Management as Risk Management
Most Talent Management strategies talk about engagement and development. Few talk about risk. Yet misaligned roles create hidden costs: burnout, disengagement, passive resistance, and quiet quitting.
Profiles PXT Select offers an early warning system. Patterns of misalignment across teams often point to leadership practices that unintentionally repel certain types of talent. If multiple strong contributors show similar stress patterns or motivational conflicts, the issue is rarely coincidence. It’s cultural design.
Used this way, PXT Select becomes less about selection and more about organizational resilience—helping leaders understand which environments amplify talent and which quietly erode it.
Development Beyond Skills
Leadership development programs often focus on skills: communication, delegation, strategic thinking. Profiles PXT Select adds a deeper layer by highlighting energy fit—how sustainable a role is for someone over time.
Two people may perform equally well today, but one is burning far more psychological energy to do so. PXT Select surfaces this difference. When leaders use the assessment to guide development conversations, coaching shifts from “How do we fix you?” to “How do we design work that allows you to thrive?”
That shift alone can transform trust, retention, and leadership credibility.
The Real Value of PXT Select
The rarely discussed truth about Profiles PXT Select is this: its greatest value isn’t identifying who fits the organization—it’s revealing whether the organization deserves the talent it’s trying to keep.
When used courageously, PXT Select challenges assumptions, exposes systemic blind spots, and elevates Talent Management from transactional decisions to strategic design. It invites leaders to stop asking, “Why isn’t this person working out?” and start asking the far more powerful question:
“What is our system teaching good people to do—or not do—every day?”
That’s where real performance begins.
