Best 50 Leadership Blog Sites in 2015

Welcome to the annual update on the 50 Best/Top leadership blogs on the web as of July 2015. This is our fourth year of putting this list together. As readers will see, once again, this list has changed quite markedly in just a 12 month period. These significant changes result from a number of factors including:

1. Alexa rankings of individual blogs have changed considerably. As in previous years, this mainly arises not only because of the time invested by individual blog authors in the last year but because many more web sites and blogs have been launched (and Alexa estimates that there are now around 95 million active, as opposed to dormant, blog sites in the world).
2. Readers a year ago (and since) alerted us to qualifying leadership blog sites we were unaware of last year and those are now included. The highest of the 4 in total at number 21.
3. Some leadership bloggers have done little to enhance or add to their blogging efforts and have slid backwards on the list (and/or in Alexa site visit numbers) or are out altogether in terms of site traffic. It’s a reminder in the online world that if you stand still you can go very quickly in the wrong direction!

This year we have produced the list in a similar way, with the Alexa ranking as the main determinant of order. As we said last year, the Alexa rank (to be found at www.alexa.com) is an imperfect ranking raw score for web site popularity (as measured by traffic to each site) but it is a useful relative comparison metric. In essence it measures how popular a site is (from 1 being Google, 2, Facebook and 3, YouTube, all the way down to the lowest active site on the web as at 1^st July 2015). Whether or not a blog has gone up in the list and how far (shaded in green) or gone down in the list and how far (shaded in red) or unshaded (no movement).

So what are the main highlights of the Best 50 Leadership Blogs?

1. Michael Hyatt stays at number 1 again.
2. A total of 4 blog authors in the 2014 list exited or slipped below the top 50.
3. 27 blog authors have held their place or gone up in the list and 19 blog authors have gone down in the list.
4. 4 blog authors are new to the 2015 list (although 2 of these (Andersen and Cran) have been in the top 50 in past years).
5. There are 39 male bloggers in the top 50 list and 11 females (females up 5 from last year). Karin Hurt at number 13 is the highest female on this year’s list. However, women are still underrepresented, given the population, and males dominate the top 10.
6. Top 50 Blog authors come from 6 countries around the world including Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and the UK with the most outside the US coming from Canada (5) but the list is dominated by US based authors (of which there are 40 in the top 50). The top 5 are all US based and so are 17 of the top 20.
7. US leadership bloggers come from 22 States with authors writing most from the sunshine states of California (8) and Florida (7) blogs.
8. Apart from the new entrants the biggest movers up the list in the last 12 months are John Maxwell (up by 44 places or over 2 million visits (on the back of his new book) in the Alexa rankings (or from 44^th to 3^rd in the list) followed by John Spence (up 19 places from 35^th to 16^th), and Gordon Tredgold (up 14 places from 32^nd to 18^th in the list).

So, let’s now look at the list. It includes the names of the individual blogger or blog owner on the left, and their primary role(s) in his or her working life. It also includes a brief summary about the focus of the blog, so that individuals can visit the ones that appear most interesting (by clicking on their name below). Happy exploring!

Many lists like the one above encompass bloggers who may talk about a lot of other subject areas well beyond leadership and related matters, and indeed may have greater experience or expertise elsewhere. This is not to say that such broadly based bloggers are not popular or interesting to know about and subscribe to – just not in a list that should be about organizational leadership and leadership development primarily. In the 50 sites above therefore you will find no mention of people such as Anthony Robbins (personal development), Guy Kawasaki (entrepreneurship) or Malcolm Gladwell (thinking/creativity) but only writers whose main focus is improved leadership or management skills in some way, shape or form.  Another excluded group is the many excellent bloggers that write about leadership issues from a faith-based standpoint (such as Ron Edmonson’s blog).  We take the view that these belong in a separate list and it would therefore be useful to publish this at some point.

The 50 blogs listed above are all “very good” and in that sense there is no sense in which one is relatively “better” than another (as this is so often about the focus of the writer and the relative interests of the reader). Michael Hyatt is top of the list (for the third year running) because he has the 19,188^th most visited site on the web right now according to Alexa rankings (in the top 0.02%-even though he has gone backwards a little since last year). In fact even our 50^th blog site (Mary Jo Asmus) has the 3,775,229^th most visited site. This puts our 50th top leadership blog in the top 7% of sites in the entire world. And by the way, this does not mean that blogger popularity or status or even overall money earned follows this order at all. This is a function of who the person is (in career status terms), what they do, how long they have been blogging and even how social media “savvy” they may be, to name but a few factors.

For those people wondering who was close to making the top 50 but not quite, the next 3 blogs are Gwyn Teatro (from Canada-3,816,598), Ed Brenegar (from the US-3,880,987), and Rich Gee (also from the US-4,491,835). Please note that the above list was compiled by Dr. Jon Warner, himself a long-term blogger in the leadership realm, (and up 2 places to number 14 on the above list). Any mistakes, errors or omissions are entirely his and should anyone have any suggested changes or input for inclusion in future blog postings such as this please contact him at jon.warner@OD-center.org

Related Resources

• Managing in Context Workshop Kit
• Managing in Context Workshop Kit Advanced
• Leadership styles booklet
• Leadership PowerPoint