Difficult Isn’t a Personality Trait: It’s a Signal of Misalignment
I've learned a hard and humbling truth about managerial hierarchy: the same manager can bring out the best in one person while bringing out the worst in another.
We’ve all had managers who seem to possess a magical ability to unlock our hidden potential, enabling us to grow in ways we never knew were possible. And we’ve had managers who we felt couldn’t recognize our unique strengths, under whose leadership we withered.
For most of my career I have equated my success or struggle with my manager as a reflection of their capabilities. A positive experience meant they were a good manager, an unpleasant one meant they were bad. As I reflect on situations where I struggled with a manager, one important pattern emerged: I was the common denominator in those relationships.
Now, I have definitely seen people who should not have been given the managerial reins, but in several unpleasant situations, the manager usually had other reports thriving under their leadership. I now recognize the issue wasn’t necessarily whether they were a good or bad manager; it was whether they were a good or bad manager for me.
Reframing the Equation
Not long ago, I was reporting to someone I would consider to be an exceptional leader — a successful and seasoned individual who was developing a strong strategy and plan for the organization. Yet no matter how much I respected their overall leadership, I felt consistently controlled and misunderstood—I was slowly withering away under the confines of their management style.
After one particularly demoralizing conversation with this leader, I reached out to my good friend and executive coach, Tamera Schmidt, who has a knack for cutting to the core of interpersonal challenges. Her guidance in this situation was particularly poignant — highlighting a challenge that, in hindsight, had been recurring throughout my career.
“Do you remember what I told you about Dog People and Cat People? You, my dear, are a Cat, and you are currently working for a Dog.”
And I immediately understood the challenge of why I was struggling with this leader.
Dogs and Cats— A Unique Perspective on Working Styles
Tam’s concept is simple. There are two types of dominant working styles which she calls "Cats and Dogs". Much like in human–pet dynamics, when Cats and Dogs report to leaders who match their style, the relationship is usually harmonious. But what happens when Dogs and Cats are misaligned in reporting hierarchy?
Dog People: Anchors of Process and Stability
A Dog Person thrives on structure, clear guidelines, and consistency. Policies, plans, and procedures act like a security blanket, providing order and predictability. Dogs' innate working style allows them to excel at executing large-scale initiatives, enforcing standards, and ensuring teams meet their objectives.
Key Dog Traits:
Thrives On: Structure, guidelines, and consistency.
Needs: Defined policies, plans, and procedures.
Seeks: Predictability and order.
Core Value: Providing stability, enforcing standards, and maintaining consistent performance.
Cat People: Catalysts for Creativity and Transformation
A Cat Person thrives on creativity, autonomy, and trust. Unlike Dogs, Cats don’t need detailed rules or guidelines to succeed — they need space and freedom to determine the best way to achieve results. When paired with leaders who value flexibility, the Cat's working style allows them to unlock innovation and transformation, helping organizations grow in unexpected ways.
Key Traits:
Thrives On: Creativity, autonomy, and trust.
Needs: Space, freedom, and flexible expectations.
Seeks: Outcomes, innovation, and results.
Core Value: Driving growth, innovation, and unlocking potential.
The Cost of Misalignment
What happens when there is misalignment between these two working styles? I have experience both as a Cat Manager leading Dog People and being a Cat reporting to a Dog Manager. I can confidently say in each instance, the results looked something like this:
Dog Manager / Cat Employee (The Cat Feels Trapped)
In this scenario, the Dog Manager will expect detailed plans or checklists, frequent updates, and adherence to their rules and ideas. When a Cat Employee shares an alternative idea or challenges an established process, a Dog Manager typically receives this input as resistance, insubordination, or a lack of respect for process. The Cat Employee feels restrained, mistrusted, and like their autonomy is being suppressed.
Cat Manager / Dog Employee (The Dog Feels Abandoned)
In this scenario, the Cat Manager gives vague goals or direction, expecting their reports to be able to “Figure it out.” They may favor inspiration over planning and can appear to move the goal line frequently. When the Dog Employee requests detailed guidance or asks to understand the change of direction, the Cat Manager typically perceives the Dog as rigid, inflexible, and insecure. The Dog Employee feels anxious, unsupported, and lacks the necessary structure to feel effective.
In both cases, job satisfaction plummets, morale erodes, and burnout or attrition follows.
Conform or Eject — Why Does the Employee Pay the Price?
This isn’t a situation about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ managers — it’s about misalignment of working styles. It is a failure by most organizations to acknowledge that working styles are as core to our identity as our personalities are. While we can adjust our working style in order to reduce friction, asking an employee to operate daily outside of their natural working style is like asking someone to run a marathon in a pair of shoes three sizes too small.
When misalignment happens there is an imbalance of responsibility. It is left to the employee to figure out how to adapt to the manager's style—they can either Conform or Eject. The outdated consensus is that the manager’s style always trumps the employee’s experience. The challenge with this is by asking the employee to adapt their natural working style, we are shutting off the place where their best ideas and most reliable work are born.
Rebel Against the Status Quo.
I challenge our leaders and organizations to stop forcing the adaptation of working styles onto the person who has the least amount of power to effect their environment. Invest in leaders’ development, not just to follow the process, but to identify and tap into the natural working styles of the human being in front of them.
The secret to success lies not in the employees’ ability to adapt to the needs of their manager, but in the manager’s ability to unlock the potential in their employees through learning to support their working style.
Working style tension isn’t a failure — it’s information. Whether through structure and process or autonomy and trust, your people deserve leaders who recognize that different working styles aren’t a weakness to correct — it’s how your employees create their best work. Tap into that, and you unlock real potential.
