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 leadership posts by Lolly Daskal, Kristin Hendrix, Ed Batista, Art Petty, and Suzi McAlpine.

From Lolly Daskal: How to Effectively Resolve Interpersonal Conflicts in the Workplace

“Show me any workplace and I’ll show you a place with interpersonal conflict. Every enterprise that brings people together is bound to run into differences at some point. That’s just part of life. And it means that for a workplace to thrive, its leaders need to know how to resolve conflict. Here are some of the fundamentals I go over with my leadership coaching clients”

From Kristin Hendrix: How to identify sub-optimal environments and when to get help

“Small discomforts can be overlooked. We can adjust and get used to them. Yet small things compound and become bigger over time. It’s rarely one thing that does us in or makes an environment unhealthy for us.”

From Ed Batista: Why Some Feedback Hurts (and What To Do About It)

“‘Feedback is a gift,’ or so we’re told, and yet sometimes that ‘gift’ is quite painful to receive. This is a theme in my work with leaders, who routinely find themselves the subject of sharp criticism in company surveys, 360 reports, Glassdoor reviews, and social media, among other places. My clients aren’t looking for pity–as leaders they understand that negative feedback comes with the territory. But they still need to figure out how to digest this feedback and what, if anything, they should do in response. “

From Art Petty: The Fallacy of the Feedback (Praise) Sandwich

“In every challenging conversations workshop I run, the topic of the feedback sandwich (aka the praise sandwich) jumps up, and we spend time sharing perspectives on the use/uselessness of this tactic. You know the approach. The feedback giver opens the discussion with praise, shares the criticism, and then closes with praise. (‘Art, I like your articles, but you are completely wrong on the praise sandwich, however, I like your articles.’)”

From Suzi McAlpine: Five ways to build a high-performance team culture

“High performance in teams doesn’t happen by accident. When I think about the teams I’ve been part of where we performed really well over time, in each case, this high performance wasn’t accidental. It was carefully nurtured by the leader of that team. These leaders were purposeful in doing a few specific things. Here are some of them…”

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. And, at my blog for part-time business book authors, I share tools and insights to help you write and publish a book you’ll be proud of.

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