How good are you at building relationships in the workplace?

Honesty, empathy, and good intentions can go a long way toward helping form productive collaborative partnerships – but there can be such a range of colleagues and management types in your work environment that figuring out how to get on with everyone is beyond even the most socially intuitive of professionals.

It never hurts to get a bit of objective insight into how your co-workers operate, and this kind of insight is perhaps most helpful when it comes to your boss: a figure traditionally remote and frequently inscrutable!

In fact, psychologist Daniel Goleman has suggested that our workplace leaders may not be so mysterious and idiosyncratic as they seem. He even divided leadership styles into six distinct types. Figuring out which one most closely fits your boss makes it a lot easier to fill in those mysterious gaps that escape classification.

The easiest boss-type to figure out may well be Goleman’s “affiliative” type. By nature, this particular breed of manager seeks to inspire and nurture working relationships within the team. Depending on your own disposition, this can become a little overbearing – we all need to find our own space and express our own ideas – but if you can find a way to openly share your feelings about developments within the team and you know when and how to compromise, you can still make an impression, despite all that close company.

[RELATED: Standing Out at Work: How to Exceed Your Boss’ Expectation]

A tougher boss to crack is the “commander.” As the name suggests, listening is not their strong point: to figure this boss out, you will need to work hard, stay focussed on results, and concentrate on presenting obstacles as opportunities and not as problems.

These types and all the others are succinctly described in this bright new infographic from QuickQuid. If you recognize your boss here, you’ll be ready to start reverse-engineering them – and figuring out how you can take your working relationship to the next level.

The 6 Types of Bosses (and How to Work For Them)