Just like the assumptions salespeople make about their prospects and customers can prevent them from closing more sales, the assumptions managers make about their staff  can make them blind to opportunities for powerful, authentic coaching moments.

Branding someone in a positive way is normally a good thing. After all, people want to create a positive personal brand they are proud of and often go to their manager for assistance in doing so. But are you coaching and supporting your people based on the facts? Maybe they actually have the skills, drive, confidence and attitude to achieve more in their role, and the assumptions you’ve made about them are holding them back.

Nurturing your team means expanding your peripheral vision and becoming more mindful about how branding people in a certain way can limit the positive impact you can make on others, preventing you from leading and coaching people to achieve unprecedented, breakthrough results.

Here are 22 real-world examples where managers have created self-imposed limitations on the health and growth of their team by misbranding people:

1) "Megan is always playing the victim. It’s never her fault.”

2) “My boss is uncoachable and is not open to feedback. He’s old school, so I just tell him what he wants to hear.”

3) “Sandra is the whiner.”

4) “We’re dealing with a legacy senior leadership team. They will never change or see the value in what we’re trying to do in the field, so we’ll just have to continually come up with ways to work around them to get what we need to be done.”

5) “There are silos in our organization that can’t be broken down because other departments just don’t get what we’re trying to accomplish.”

6) “Jose is not a team player.”

7) “You try telling the CEO to change.”

8) “John is really the only one equipped to work well cross-functionally with other teams.”

9) “Lucas is overly sensitive and does not take constructive criticism well.”

10) “Ahmed is never going to use the CRM the way we need him to. Let’s find another way to work around this.”

11) “Maria is difficult to talk to and always seems as if she’s on the defensive.”

12) “Eleri is always late and is terrible with time management.”

13) “Frank is abrasive. I’ve heard this from a variety of sources. He will also stab you in the back and steal your clients. I’m just warning you now.”

14) “Why would I question Brian’s performance when he’s hitting his sales goals each quarter?”

15) "The only time I need to get HR involved is to make sure I’m following protocol when terminating someone or dealing with compliance issues.”

16) “Stephanie has been selling successfully for 30 years. Let her continue with her way of doing things—we’ll train new hires on our company’s official sales process.”

17) “Marketing doesn’t understand what a qualified lead actually is. They don’t understand the role of my salespeople. I’m not 100% confident in the value of the leads they send us.”

18) “Patrick just doesn’t have what it takes to hit his numbers. He’s not coachable.”

19) “I already know how Angelina is going to react if I bring this up. She’s going to freak out and I don’t feel like dealing with that right now.”

20) “The sales engineers have no idea how to sell or what it takes to bring in a closed deal. All they keep pushing for is more data and information about the project and specifications. Let me just do what I do best as a salesperson and sell. We can worry about that stuff afterwards.”

21) “Hector is amazing at managing the projects with his team. I never have to worry about him. That’s why I just leave him alone and stay out of his way.”

22) “Matias isn’t from here so you know he’s going to react poorly if you ask him to work better with the account managers and get them more involved.”

Think deeper about how branding someone like this impacts you, as well as the person you branded. How do your assumptions about people change the way you interact with them? How does this affect their personal brand within your company? What does this do to their reputation? What message are you sending about this person to others who don’t know them and may one day, have to work with them in some capacity?

Challenge your limiting thinking. Choose to communicate in a more engaging, collaborative way.

Keith Rosen, CEO of Coachquest, has written several best-sellers, including “Own Your Day“ and “Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions,” winner of five International Best Book awards and the No. 1 best-selling sales management coaching book on Amazon.