You're Not Stuck Because of Your Company. You're Stuck Because of Your Working Style.
🗓️ MARINA MIDDLETON POSTED TO THE GROUP CHAT Mar 24, 2026
Career & Personal Branding | Leadership & Identity
You're not stuck because of your company. You're stuck because of your working style.
I've seen this pattern play out across every phase of my career. Corporate. Solopreneur. Hiring freelancers. Running a multimillion-dollar company with multiple departments. The roles change. The dynamic doesn't.
There are two types of people on every team.
The first type gets a task and completes it. Checks the box. Moves on. Waits for the next one. They do exactly what's asked. Nothing more. And they wonder why they've been in the same role for years.
The second type gets the same task and before they start, they're already asking: why does this matter? How does this impact the team? The revenue? The customer? The company? They think 10 steps ahead. They don't just finish the task. They finish it in a way that makes everything around them better.
That's the difference between someone who has a job and someone who's building a career.
The research backs this up. A Bain & Company study identified six worker archetypes based on what actually energizes people at work — and found that only about 15% of employees are what they call "self-starters" who bring full initiative and ownership to their roles. The rest? They're waiting to be told what to do. Not because they're lazy. Because no one ever showed them the bigger picture.
Yale researchers also found that people fundamentally orient to work in one of three ways: as a job (a paycheck), a career (advancement and status), or a calling (meaning and purpose). The calling orientation consistently correlates with higher performance, more initiative, and lower turnover. You can read more about that framework here.
Here's the thing though. As a leader, you actually need both types. Not every role requires a visionary thinker. And not every visionary thinker belongs in an execution role.
Your operations, your systems, your processes? You need the people who take pride in precision and consistency. Who find satisfaction in a clean inbox and a completed checklist. These are the people who make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Without them, nothing ships.
Your strategy roles, your growth roles, the people sitting closest to leadership and decision-making? You need the ones who can't help but ask "what's this connected to?" The ones who see a task and immediately think about how it connects to the P&L, the customer experience, the brand. These are the people who push the company forward.
The mistake most leaders make is expecting type one to behave like type two without ever giving them the context, the training, or the seat that would develop that thinking. Or putting type two in a purely execution role and watching them burn out because they're bored.
The real skill as a CEO isn't hiring one type over the other. It's knowing which seat each person belongs in.
And the best people I've ever worked with? They started as type one and became type two. Not because someone forced them. Because someone gave them visibility into the bigger picture and they couldn't unsee it.
That's your job as a leader. Give your people the context. Show them how their work connects. Watch which ones light up.
Those are the ones you bet on.
Key Takeaways
01. Your working style, not your company, determines your trajectory. Two people can be in the same role, same company, same manager. One gets promoted. One stays stuck. The difference is almost always orientation, not opportunity.
02. Only about 15% of employees show up as true self-starters. According to Bain, most workers are energized by stability, structure, or recognition, not initiative. That's not a character flaw. It's data. Use it to build better teams.
03. Job vs. career vs. calling changes everything. Yale's research shows that how you frame your work mentally changes how you perform. The calling orientation isn't something you either have or don't. It can be cultivated, especially when leaders give people context and visibility.
04. You need both types. Put them in the right seats. Precision and execution people are the backbone. Strategic thinkers are the engine. Mixing them up is where leaders lose good people.
05. The best leaders create type two thinkers. You can't force it. But you can create the conditions for it. Show people how their work connects to something bigger and watch who lights up. That's your talent pipeline.
