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 about good communication by Chris Edmonds, Les Hayman, Steve Roesler, Mary Jo Asmus, and Ed Batista.

From Chris Edmonds: Don’t Bump The Fishbowl

“Leaders bump their employee’s fishbowls all the time! Leaders may not intend to disrupt employee’s work lives, but actions such as these do ‘bump the fishbowl.'”

From Les Hayman: Great Leaders Tell Stories

“Great leaders paint pictures by telling stories, not by showing people lists of bullet points.”

Wally’s Comment: Here’s a technique that’s worked for me for years. I learned it from Bert Decker. You may want to use PowerPoint to display images or other media. Great. But you don’t want it to distract your audience when you’re telling a story, which should be the most powerful part of your presentation. So, make the screen black. Use can use a black slide, turn or the projector, cover the lens, or anything else that will remove the distraction of a slide while you’re telling your story.

From Steve Roesler: Communication: Where to Find the Meaning

“Maybe the greatest single stumbling block to real communication is the one-sided nature of speaking.”

From Mary Jo Asmus: The courage to listen

“Performance evaluations and 360’s might provide feedback on your smarts but they rarely gage your ability to listen. Yet listening is foundational to all other qualities we expect to see in our leaders such as decisiveness, strategic thinking, influence, and getting results. In the noise of our organizations, listening gets little attention.”

From Ed Batista: The Communication Funnel

“The communication funnel is a concept I regularly discuss with coaching clients, most of whom are senior leaders in constant contact with their direct reports and/or managing virtual teams.”

That’s it for this week’s selections from independent business blogs. If you liked this piece you may enjoy my regular post on “Leadership Reading to Start Your Week” points you to choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms about strategy, innovation, women and the workplace, and work now and in the future. Highlights from the last issue include leading by asking, echoes of the dot-com bust in the big-data gold rush, three ways cloud computing is driving rapid innovation, influential business women share their pearls of wisdom, and the rise of robotics.

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.

If you’re a boss, you should check out my Working Supervisor’s Support Kit.