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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 most important things, building relationships, 360 degree performance reviews, inaction, and evidence-based management.

From Scott Eblin: An Army Colonel’s Three Simple Rules of Leadership
"Last week, I had the opportunity to join a small group of leadership coaches for dinner with retired US Army Colonel Steve Dwyer. Colonel Dwyer is enjoying a second career in the private sector after spending thirty years as a soldier, most of it in Army Aviation.  He shared a lot of interesting stories and insights with us that night.  The one that really stuck with me was the years long process he went through to get his philosophy of leadership down to three simple rules.

Wally's Comment: As I wrote in "An Elevator Speech for Bosses," I'm a big fan of bosses who can get their most important rules or expectations into a simple format. Colonel Dwyer boiled his down to three statements, but the big lessons from this post are the process he used and how long it took. Good things take time.

From Mary Jo Asmus: Conversation, Praise, Pizza, Books, and Chocolate
"So often we think of team or relationship building in terms of formal activities. Yet the simplicity of the informal done consistently over time can have the same effect as the expensive off-site where you bring in a consultant to engage in team building (p.s. I’m not arguing against the latter since I get hired to facilitate such events; I’m just saying that the formal and the informal activities both have their place). Consider some of these favorite no cost or low cost informal activities to help you build relationships."

Wally's Comment: We spend so much time concentrating on the bottom line that we often don't leave time for the relationships that make great teams great. Mary Jo Asmus offers you some simple ways to improve those relationships.

From Art Petty: Time to Take out the 360-Degree Trash
"While I’m certain there’s a good 360-degree feedback program out there somewhere, the trash frequently heaped upon unwitting corporate victims by misguided management groups via their HR departments is….well, it’s trash. Please place it in a proper container and dispose of it before it starts to stink."

Wally's Comment: Read this welcome antidote to all the 360 degree appraisal hype. 360 degree evaluations can be powerfully effective, if they're done well. Done poorly they can be useless and even dangerous.

From Tanmay Vora: On Leadership and Dealing with Comfortable Inaction
"Comfortable inaction is the state where the immediate implication of not doing something is not visible, but in a longer run, it takes a toll. Comfortable inaction (especially by people at leadership positions) can be a real plague to the organization’s growth. Here are a few examples of how people use comfortable inaction at work:

Wally's Comment: I love Tanmay's phrase, "comfortable inaction." It seems right and non-threatening and harmless. But it's really a choice to let things happen to you instead of shaping events, and as a friend of mine used to tell his protégés, "Remember that left to themselves very few things improve."

From Evidence Soup: There's no end state that is "evidence-based management". The goal is to get more people to consume valid evidence.
"In complex organizations, there's no end state where everybody is cheerfully practicing "evidence-based management": There's never complete evidence, and there's never complete agreement on what the evidence means (or even what counts as evidence). But I think we can agree that evidence-informed action is a good thing, so we need to create systems that make it possible."

Wally's Comment: In movies and in fairy tales people may live happily ever after, but not in business or real life. 

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" which features five choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. The last issue had pointers to articles about leadership and creativity, leading a turnaround, reinventing the perception of an industry, learning from Edgar Schein, and neuroscience and management.

Here, on Three Star Leadership, I post things that will help a boss at any level do better and live a better life. At Results vs Activities, I join other bloggers with posts on talent development. My blog at the Toolbox for HR is People and the Changing Workplace .

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

And be sure to stop by at Weekly Leader where I'll offer you my Challenge of the Week.

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.