Are You Promoting the Wrong People? How Understanding Work Styles Unlocks Team Potential

Brandon Stevens

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Ever wondered why a star performer struggles after being promoted to manager? Or why a team that looks great on paper is plagued by low morale and missed deadlines? The answer often lies in a hidden mismatch of Work Styles, a crucial factor that many companies completely overlook.

As a manager, understanding one specific dimension of Work Style — the difference between an Innovator and an Optimizer — can be the key to building resilient, high-performing teams and developing a smart succession plan.

Meet the Two Problem-Solvers: The Innovator and The Optimizer

Work Style isn’t about “personality”; it’s about how we naturally prefer to do our work. When it comes to problem-solving, most people lean toward one of two styles:

• The Innovator (The Architect): Innovators thrive at the beginning of the problem-solving cycle. They love a blank canvas. Their energy comes from defining a new problem, brainstorming creative solutions, and building something from scratch. They ask, “What if we tried something completely new?”
• The Optimizer (The Civil Engineer): Optimizers excel later in the problem-solving cycle. They shine when a system is already in place. Their talent lies in refining, maintaining, and improving existing solutions to make them more efficient, stable, and scalable. They ask, “How can we make this better, faster, and more reliable?”

Both styles are absolutely essential for a successful organization. You need Innovators to create the future and Optimizers to make sure it actually works. The chaos begins when you put the right person in the wrong role.

The High Cost of a Mismatch

The most common and damaging mistake is placing a natural Innovator into a role that demands an Optimizer’s skill set — a classic example being a management position. Most management roles are fundamentally about optimization: maintaining stability, refining processes, and ensuring the team runs smoothly and predictably.

When you put an Innovator in that seat, you create friction for everyone:

• The Manager Gets Frustrated: The Innovator manager quickly becomes bored with the routine of daily check-ins, performance reviews, and process enforcement. They may constantly try to “reinvent” systems that don’t need changing, creating whiplash for their team.
• The Team Gets Confused: The team struggles with a lack of consistency. Their manager seems to chase “shiny new objects” while neglecting the core support and stability they need to do their jobs effectively.
• The Result: Morale plummets, productivity drops, and your best people — both the mismatched manager and their frustrated reports — start looking for the exit.

This isn’t a failure of talent; it’s a failure of fit.

The Key to Smarter Succession Planning

This framework is a powerful tool for succession planning. Too often, companies promote their best individual contributor without considering if their Work Style fits the demands of leadership. The star salesperson (an Innovator who loves cracking new accounts) may be a disastrous sales manager (an Optimizer role focused on process and pipeline management).

By identifying Work Styles early, you can build a more intentional leadership pipeline. You can map employees not just by their current skills but by their potential fit for future roles, ensuring you’re grooming people to step into positions where they will naturally thrive.

Your 3-Step Action Plan

So, how do you fix this and build a team where everyone is positioned to succeed?

1. Diagnose and Assess

First, you need data. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

• Use Assessments: Implement simple, validated Work Style assessments for your entire team, starting with leadership. This gives you a clear, objective baseline.
• Observe and Listen: Pay attention to how your team members approach tasks. Who loves brainstorming sessions? Who gets energized by refining a workflow? Discuss these preferences in your one-on-ones. Ask questions like, “What part of your last project did you enjoy the most?” or “When do you feel most ‘in the zone’ at work?”

2. Align Roles with Styles

Once you have the data, you can start making strategic adjustments.

• For the Innovator in an Optimizer Role: Can you reshape their responsibilities? Perhaps they can lead a special project on a new initiative or be tasked with exploring new tools, while a strong Optimizer on the team takes ownership of daily operations.
• For the Optimizer in an Innovator Role: Give them ownership over a critical system. Empower them to find efficiencies and make incremental improvements that have a massive impact over time. Celebrate their contributions to stability and quality.

3. Coach for Awareness

This isn’t about boxing people in. It’s about empowering them with self-awareness.

• Provide Direct, Educational Feedback: Instead of criticizing, help them understand their own tendencies. For an Innovator manager, you might say, “I see your strength in generating new ideas. Let’s work on creating stable processes so the team feels supported day-to-day.”
• Develop a Mutual Action Plan (MAP): Work with the employee to set goals that both leverage their strengths and develop their weaker areas. For an Innovator, this might include dedicated time for new projects balanced with non-negotiable time for core management duties. Monitor progress, adjust the plan, and provide constant support.

Your people are your single greatest asset. As a leader, your commitment must be to understand them deeply. In today’s competitive landscape, your advantage won’t come from product superiority alone — it will come from having the right people, in the right roles, doing work that energizes and fulfills them.

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