They can be hard on you. It's a tough love thing. If you have a tough time with tough love, it will be a struggle for you.
Upper management can over promise and under deliver on updates and upgrades to products, new products, go-live dates, etc. i.e. They will tell you a new product, feature, sample, etc. will be available at a certain date, but it is not actually ready for another 6 months to a year. So you get your customers excited, and then spend a good chunk of time pushing them off until it's finally ready, and even then it may not be able to do all the things you were told (and in turn told your customers) it could do.
The worst part is samples.... Our customers require them in order to show the product and sell them to homeowners and end users. Samples are often back logged and out of stock, and you are still expected to grow sales without being able to give your customers the tools they need with which to make and generate those sales.