Independent business blogs are blogs that aren’t supported by an organization like a magazine, newspaper, company, or business school. Those people provide lots of great content, but they don’t need any additional exposure. In this post, every week, I bring you posts of quality from excellent bloggers that don’t get as much publicity.

This week, I’m pointing you to posts by Alli Polin, Lolly Daskal, Todd Ordal, Ken Downer, and Ann Bares.

From Alli Polin: 15 Compelling Reasons You Shouldn’t Hire a Coach

“Imagine the dinner party conversation. Room full of strangers and everyone is making polite yet slightly boring conversation. Hot topics range from the weather to upcoming holidays to what you do for work. Often, when asked what I do, I’ll say I’m a coach. Then I get the dog look. You know the one.”

From Lolly Daskal: 10 Ways Successful People Work with People They Don’t Like

“For productive and effective work, there’s nothing like collaboration with people you already like and respect—people you trust and know you can work well with. Eventually, though, it will likely fall upon you to work with someone you just don’t like. If you try to get out of it you only end up looking bad. That’s why learning to collaborate successfully with people you dislike is such a valuable skill.”

From Todd Ordal: Effective Leadership Skills: Unlearn the Need To Be Liked

“The problem arises when you need everyone to like you; when your need to please becomes irrational and causes you to take actions that are detrimental to yourself or your company in order to please someone else; when short term pleasantries are more important that productive relationships. If you can recall a time or two in high school when you did something really dumb because you wanted to impress that cool kid, you know the feeling. (I got kicked out of high school for a few days because of this, but that’s another story…) Remember the kid who was the class clown? He or she had a bad case of NTBL.”

From Ken Downer: Change the Game: 7 Ways to Build Teammates Who Can Do More

“How do we increase the odds of ‘winning’ with the team we have?”

From Ann Bares: What Incentives Can Do, What Incentives Cannot Do

“For starters, it is important to have a sense of the circumstances you are fixing to drop them into and the objectives you (or the prospective plan ‘sponsor’) hope to achieve by putting them in place. If you don’t, start there. Next, you’ll need to face up to the reality that there are problems which incentives cannot fix (and may even make worse). What follows is my own list of what incentives can and cannot do. Many of you will have your own lists; I would love to hear them.”

That’s it for this week’s selections from independent business blogs. If you liked this piece you may enjoy my curation posts on this blog. Every Tuesday, “Leaders and Strategies in Real Life” helps you learn about leadership by studying what real leaders do. On Fridays you can wrap up your week with “Weekend Leadership Reading” consisting of choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms.

How I Select Posts for this Midweek Review

The five posts I select to share in my Midweek Review of the Independent Business Blogs are picked from a regular review of about sixty blogs I check daily and an additional twenty-five or so that I check occasionally. Here’s how I select the posts you see in this review.

They must be published within the previous week.

They must support the purpose of the blog: to help leaders at all levels do a better job and lead a better life.

They must be from an independent business blog.

As a general rule, I only select posts that stand on their own, no selections from a series.

Also as a general rule, I do not select posts that are either a book review or a book report.

I reserve the right to make exceptions to the above.

Here, on Three Star Leadership, I post things that will help a boss at any level do a better job and live a better life. At the The 360 Degree Feedback blog, I join other bloggers with posts on leadership development. And, at Wally Bock’s Writing Edge, I share tools and insights to help you write better.

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