Q: I've been having trouble at work. I went on medical leave from September to December, during which time my boss started to receive my email. When I returned to work, she decided to keep reading my email. I know this because frequently she comes to my office to ask me questions about them. Yesterday she called me in for a meeting, and pulled out a large folder with my emails printed out with notes on them.

Is this a sign I'm about to be fired? And if I'm about to be fired, is preemptively quitting better than getting fired?

A: Why not ask her what's going on? Say something like, “I'm getting the sense that you're concerned about how I'm handling my email, both because you're still monitoring it, which you didn't do before I went on leave, and because you've been asking me about it. Do you have concerns about my performance that we should talk about?”

As for whether quitting is better than being fired, that's really premature at this point (and depends on lots of factors that aren't in your letter). First you need to find out what's going on.

Q: I am a manager of a small satellite office of six employees. I know that, as manager, I should not be friends with my co-workers, but our office is so small it is unavoidable. Also, I personally like to work in a fun, irreverent office, so I foster that kind of culture. Typically it works out really well. Everyone has fun and works well together. But occasionally I have encountered incidents where my co-workers have crossed the line with me. For example, they feel like they can be curt or rude to me when they're angry, which is something I would never do to my manager, no matter how close we are.

How would you recommend handling that kind of situation, when I am walking the line between being a manager and a friend? Is there any way other than directly addressing the problem with the co-worker, which in the past has not worked particularly well? For some reason, when I've actually addressed the behavior, it seems to cement the resentment.

A: Well, you're basically saying, “I don't want to have an appropriate manager-managee relationship with my staff, except on some occasions when I want the benefits of it without the work.” If you blur the boundaries, it's no surprise that your staff thinks the boundaries have been blurred. And I can't really let you get away with saying that this is “unavoidable” because it's not, and plenty of other managers in small offices do manage to avoid it.

In any case, if you're addressing issues head-on and it's not working, then you need to be firmer in your approach and you need to set and enforce consequences. And if you have people acting resentfully toward you, you need to address that too. You're their manager — you need to act like it. Every day, not just when there's something you want to address.

And honestly, this isn't really optional or something you get to decide not to do just because you prefer to run things differently. Unless you're the owner of this business, you have an obligation to act like a manager, because that's the job you're being paid to do.

Q: I'm going to interview with a company in the gaming industry at their headquarters. Their headquarters are a monument to nerd-ism, and I'd love to bring a camera and take some pictures. Do you think it would look good if a candidate asks, “Can I take a picture of this 5-foot tall statue of a game character?” Or can I ask for a picture with one of my interviewers, who works as a game designer on a title that sold 25 million copies the same day it was released?

I'm so excited about this opportunity, and I don't want to ruin it because of a silly mistake.

A: Don't do it. You'll look like you're there as a fan rather than as a serious candidate. And they are making time to talk with you as a job candidate, not a fan who wants to take pictures. While some people might not be put off by this, enough will that it's too much of a risk.

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues. Want to submit a question? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.