Employees know when they have a “nice” manager who isn’t really in charge—and in the end, it makes them feel unsafe. Dr. Henry Cloud literally wrote the book on this topic, but I wanted to share a cast of characters to help represent some of the boundary-challenging habits I’ve seen that can undermine the good manager.

Please don’t be too alarmed if you see yourself in one of these descriptions—that was one of my intentions. I wanted to make it easy for you to identify yourself. After all, you can’t craft a solution until you identify the real nature of the problem. My intention in using the labels is to keep things fun and light, but also to be clear.  Okay, here goes:

The In-Director. You believe people don’t like to be bossed around, and you don’t want people to think you’re bossy.  So you don’t give super…