Rooster is 酉, the middle of autumn — the point in the Korean saju year where sorting is finished and what remains is what was worth keeping. The sign gets written up in English as vain or fussy, which misses the mechanism entirely. What Roosters actually have is a low tolerance for the gap between how a thing is described and how it is, and a habit of closing that gap out loud.
At work
You are the quality function of whatever team you are on, whether or not that is your title. You will find the error in the deck, the inconsistency in the plan, the claim that nobody checked, and you will find it before it ships. That is worth a great deal and it is not always experienced as help. The Roosters who do best learn one adjustment: raise the problem privately first, once, and let the other person bring it to the room. You lose the credit and you keep the influence, and influence is the thing that actually compounds.
With people
You are more loyal than the reputation suggests and considerably harder on yourself than on anyone else. The standard people find exacting when you point it at them is a fraction of the one you run internally. Where this hurts close relationships is that you tend to express care as correction — noticing what someone could do better is, to you, evidence of paying attention. It is not received that way. Saying the plain approving thing, with nothing attached, is harder for this sign than for any other and does more work than any amount of accurate feedback.
Rooster compatibility
Snake and Ox are your metal triad — three signs that would rather be correct than comfortable, which means nobody has to apologise for holding a standard. Dragon is the six-harmony pair and the more generative one: Dragon supplies scale and you supply the check on it, and the arrangement works because Dragon actually wants the question asked, even while resenting it.
Rabbit sits opposite you and manages the room where you correct it; what you consider honesty Rabbit experiences as being handled roughly, and neither reading is wrong. Dog is the harm relation and the more frustrating one, because on paper you should agree — you both care about things being right — but Dog judges by intention and you judge by result, and that difference surfaces in exactly the arguments that matter.
Where the strength turns over
The precision flips when it turns inward with nothing to fix. The same instrument that catches errors in a document catches them in your own past at three in the morning, and there is no version of the memory accurate enough to satisfy it.
How Korean saju reads this branch
Rooster is 酉 — a peak branch, sitting at the centre of its season with a single element inside it. Rooster's is Metal, pure, and Korean saju treats the pure-metal position as the clearest of the twelve: no second force, no softening, one standard applied all the way down. That is the whole sign in a sentence, and it is why Rooster readings are shorter than Ox or Dog readings even though the three share the same metal family. There is simply less arguing with itself inside 酉 than inside a storehouse branch.
Are you actually this sign?
Roosters are born in September, so your own sign is not in question, but the boundary is worth carrying. Korean saju starts the year at ipchun (立春), around February 4 — not at Lunar New Year, which is the cut most English-language zodiac calculators use. Anyone born in January or the first days of February is the previous animal here. Given how much you dislike an unchecked claim, it is a fair thing to check on the people you have already sorted.
Once a week, say the good thing without the improvement attached to the end of it. The improvement will still be true next week.