9 leadership blogs to build your management skills

As a manager, you are expected to give advice, guidance, motivation and inspiration to your team. It’s helpful to have sources at the ready that guide and inspire you.

Here are nine management blogs to help you develop your leadership skills.

1. The Chief Happiness Officer

Alexander Kjerulf’s blog focuses on creating a work environment with happy, motivated employees. He writes quick thoughts and full posts addressing the subject.

Here are three blog posts we recommend:

• Teach employees to disagree with the boss
• Kill the suggestion box
• Top 5 business maxims that have to go

2. The Management Blog by BusinessWeek

BusinessWeek brings you articles that look at the business side of management to help you keep an eye on the bigger picture.

Some highlights include:

• To become a better leader, be aware
• The world needs data-savvy managers

3. Penelope Trunk

Penelope is well known for honest, straight-forward career advice from her experience in four startups. She currently writes from a farm in rural Wisconsin and offers stories and unique insight into career and management.

Here's some sound advice from her:

• How to shine in a meeting
• How I manage up
• Put yourself in uncomfortable positions

4. The John Maxwell Co.

John Maxwell has been working in organisational development for 40 years and offers insight about leading teams and managing people.

Some thoughts on leadership include:

• How to tell a player apart from a pretender
• Ask not what your people can do for you …
• Practicing disciplines today that will lead to success tomorrow

5. Harvard Business Review Blog Network

HBR is sponsored by Harvard University with daily posts from a number of contributors. They address a manager’s role as well as articles about industries and business.

Recent articles:

• How to spend the first ten minutes of your day
• Don’t do what you love; do what you do
• Managing two people who hate each other

6. Presentation Zen

As a manager, you will find yourself making formal, informal, planned and unplanned presentations. This blog can give you guidance on how to speak, so that you can influence people.

Read these first:

• Story structure, simplicity and hacking away at the unessential
• Change and the art of small victories

7. Inc.com

This online magazine caters to entrepreneurs and startups, but the underlying theme is leadership in business and in your work environment.

Here's their take on leadership:

• 5 key decisions that will shape your career
• How to be a better listener
• 9 types of bosses you never want to be

8. Ask a manager

This blog is run by Alison Green and is in the form of Q & A. Its popularity stems from real scenarios and real answers to both the expected and the astonishing in the world of management.

Example posts:

• New managers and authority
• How to manage a team that’s older than you

9. Management Issues

The wise words on this blog come from regular and guest contributors. They focus on junior to mid-level management topics.

Trending:

• Don’t be a busy fool!
• Should meetings be fun?
• Ten habits of bad management

Keeping up

In order to effectively manage people, you have to learn how to lead, how to communicate, how to motivate and how to handle problems.

While you’re balancing your own tasks with managing a team, you don’t have time to sift through worthless resources or search for that one blog you read once and liked. Sign up for a tool like Feedly or Bloglovin', instead. It gives you regular updates from the blogs you follow.

(Updated 20th December 2018)