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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 on the evil dashboards do, bad leadership days, the "toddler" audit, a cowardly manager's guide to acting cowardly, and job crafting.

From Caddell Insight Group: The tyranny of the dashboard
"I frankly am beginning to feel that I’m shouting into a void here. Companies are spending more time and money equipping the CEO and team with information, while starving the thousands of ground-level employees who, frankly, can have more impact on the company’s success simply through their day-to-day actions."

Wally's Comment: One of the great things about learning mathematical modeling early was that I learned that in most systems there are only a couple of variables that matter. Alas, most of today's executives haven't learned that. Maybe they're afraid they'll miss something. Maybe they just don't trust the people who work for them. They'd sure do better if they listen to John Caddell.

From Management Excellence: A Mostly Thoughtful Guide to Surviving Bad Leadership Days
"Even the most dedicated and experienced of leaders will admit that there are more than a few days when they wonder whether it might not be a lot less stressful to hang up their leadership cleats in favor of an individual contributor role. Like marriage, not every day as a leader is filled with wine and roses.  There are many days when you will drive home from work wondering whether you truly accomplished anything, and others when you will feel like you just took a few steps in the wrong direction."

Wally's Comment: To quote one of my best friends, "Some days are nothing short of brass-plated sh*tholes." You will have days like that. It's written in the stars. When you do, you'll treasure this advice from Art Petty.

From the Effective CIO: Toddler Audit
"As any parent can tell you, there comes a time in a child’s life when they seek to learn everything.  Around the age of three or so, children suddenly want to understand the reason for everything.  No matter what the issue, they ask one simple question, over and over again: why?'"

Wally's Comment: Toddlers want to know why. As Chuck Musciano points out, so do good managers.

From Great Leadership: The Cowardly Manager’s Guide to Dealing with Poor Performers
"Dealing with a poor performer has to be one of the hardest responsibilities of a leader. Great leaders confront performance issues head on. They provide feedback, coaching, counseling, and if all else fails, real leaders fire underperformers. It’s all part of earning your scars as a leader. Cowardly managers come up with all kind of creative ways to avoid dealing with performance issues. Here is a summary of many of the actual methods I’ve encountered"

Wally's Comment: OK, you're responsible for the performance of a group and some of your team members aren't performing up to par. Others are toxic to team relationships. It's time to confront them, but that's very, very scary. You can learn how to handle things from the contents of my Working Supervisor's Support Kit. But if you want to continue in your cowardly ways, Dan McCarthy offers you several ways to not get the job done. With Dan's advice, you can be a coward eleven different ways.

From Authentic Organizations: How Job Crafting Can Get You Closer to Authentic Work
"Job crafting is the practice of (re-)shaping the job that you are expected to do so that you can enlarge the parts that are important to you. Through job crafting, an employee can take on new activities, new responsibilities, and new relationships, making the job so bigger (or smaller), more interesting, more useful, and overall more closely linked to their strengths and interests."

Wally's Comment: I confess that I wasn't familiar with the term "job crafting" when I read this post. But I knew what it was. Every great supervisor I studied worked to make sure that the job-description in practice keep changing as team members grew and developed and team needs changed. I've also seen this institutionalized in companies like Koch Industries, but without the specific language.

If you're a boss, consider this. The job description as it exists in most organizations is a relic of the machine age. It assumes that neither people nor team needs change. It assumes that people are interchangeable parts that can and should be fitted into a system. That's simply not good enough for the Knowledge and Relationships Age. Job crafting is something you should be doing, no matter what you call it.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.