If you find yourself answering “yes” to three or more of these questions, you might be suffering from Nice Boss Syndrome. In that case, it’s time to change your ways. If you want to be respected, not just liked:

Keep an “expectations logbook”, laying out performance expectations for each of your staff, your ongoing daily observations about their performance, and any actions you’ve taken to enforce your expectations.

For each of your reports, revisit the goals you’ve set. Are they ambitious or aggressive enough? Are they clear and quantifiable? Don’t downgrade just because someone failed to meet a goal.

Is there a way to “gamify” performance expectations and make them public or transparent among your team? Doing so might foster healthy competition while making it harder for you to wiggle out if you need to hold people accountable.

Practice delivering negative feedback: Avoid emotion and stick to the facts; flag that negative feedback is coming so it’s not a surprise; focus on how to do it better next time rather than just critiquing the past.

“Nice” bosses may feel good about themselves, but they don’t get world-class results. Demanding bosses do. And if you work for a nice boss, don’t get too self-satisfied. If you aren’t getting better at whatever you do for a living, and learning and growing in the process, you’re not just standing still, you’re really falling behind.

In the modern business world – where competition can come from anyone and anywhere, anytime – just getting by is not a winning formula.

Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management and Director of the Leadership Center at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. His new book is Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Manage the Flow of Talent (Portfolio/Penguin, 2016).

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