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, Ken Downer, Art Petty, Kevin Eikenberry, and Dan Rockwell.

From Alli Polin: 7 Questions to Ask Yourself When You Want to Make a Change

“The challenge comes when they stop being a partner in the coaching and look to me as the leader in the relationship – the one with all of the answers. Coaching works best when I lean in 100%, they lean in 100% and together, we make things happen. It’s a lesson I forgot when I showed up at the gym to meet my trainer.”

From Ken Downer: Team Leadership: 4 Simple Steps to Getting Stuff Done

“What should we be doing right now? What should we get ready to do next? With that approach in mind, here’s a simple four-step process we can use as a way to think about the problems we face and the kind of team leadership we need to provide to resolve them.”

From Art Petty: When Proposing Change, Try Reducing the Threat Level First

“Good managers work hard at pushing fear out of the workplace. Yet, even in the healthiest of organizations, fear’s close cousin, anxiety, worms its way into our consciousness and governs how we process and react to the idea of change and each other. Skilled change leaders in the workplace understand this human reaction to new and different ideas and work hard to reduce the threat level when proposing something new.”

From Kevin Eikenberry: Seven Ways to Be More Self-Aware

“There is research that shows that as humans we aren’t very self-aware. But you don’t need research to prove that to you. (Even if you don’t see this in yourself, you see it in others, right?) When we can get outside of ourselves and take a fresh perspective, we can become more self-aware, happier, and more successful.”

From Dan Rockwell: Why Talented Leaders Fail

“You can ‘succeed’ at leadership and still fail. We all know leaders who achieved great results but acted like asses in the process.”

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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