Better At Work with Cathal Quinlan

A good conversation changes what you say next. Neil Mullarkey joins Cathal Quinlan to explore what improvisation can teach us about listening, leadership and working together. Neil is a comedian, communication trainer and author of In the Moment. From his early comedy partnership with Mike Myers to his work with teams, Neil shares practical ways to respond to the person in front of you, make room...

Saying yes to one thing leaves less time for something else. So how do you decide what deserves your attention? In the first Listener Questions episode of Season 5, Cathal Quinlan and Annette Sloan revisit Caroline Webb’s interview and the ideas in her book Leadership Intelligence . Annette shares three tools she wants to use: Yes-Grow-No for deciding what to take on, hand over or decline; ACORN f...

Season 5 starts with the guest who started it all. Caroline Webb is back, tackling a question every overloaded leader needs to answer: what should you stop doing yourself? Caroline joined Better at Work for our very first episode in 2022. Now she returns with Leadership Intelligence and a practical conversation about the shift from doing great work yourself to helping other people do theirs. She a...

Toughing it out is not resilience. Chronic pressure without recovery drains people, and the ones praised for coping are often closest to the edge. In this Better Moment, organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich takes apart the bounce-back myth: why "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is backwards, why resilience behaves like a budget rather than a personality trait, and why almost none of u...

Conflict at work is not simply a choice between charging in and avoiding it. In this four-and-a-half-minute Better Moment, *Smart Conflict* authors Alice Driscoll and Louise van Haarst focus on two useful forces: conflict confidence, and the desire to get it right or be right. They explain why enforced harmony can crowd out healthy disagreement, and how to move from relational conflict, me against...

Hope at work is not optimism. It is a goal worth reaching, more than one credible route forward and enough agency to move. In this seven-minute Better Moment, burnout researcher and workplace culture strategist Jennifer Moss draws on Charles Snyder's hope theory to explain why hope is a practical leadership strategy. Jennifer looks at the growing hope gap among younger workers, why small completed...

A good job is not the same for everyone. Laura Gassner Otting gives us four dials for working out whether a role actually fits: calling, connection, contribution and control. Calling is the force that pulls you forward. Connection is whether your work matters. Contribution is what the work gives your life. Control is the agency you have over your time, decisions and environment. The practical ques...

The loudest predictions about AI count the jobs it might destroy. Russell Beck says that is the wrong unit of analysis. Technology is very good at removing the scarce skill inside a job. Russell's example is a naval shipyard worker wearing an exoskeleton. The job remains. The work becomes safer. The employer gains a wider talent pool. Physical strength stops being the thing that makes one person u...

Most companies can show you a plan. Far fewer can explain the choices underneath it. In this Better Moment, Roger Martin strips strategy back to what it actually is: what you do, not what you say. He explains why a list of initiatives is not a strategy, how the question “What would have to be true?” can get a divided room moving, and why AI is much better at finding the average answer than a disti...

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Cathal and Annette close out season four together in London, in person for once. The four ideas from 30+ episodes that actually changed how they work: Laura Gassner Otting's four Cs of a fulfilling career, Zach Mercurio on the mattering deficit, Colin Fisher (The Collective Edge) on teams and clarity, and the Smart Conflict five Rs from Louise van Haast and Alice Driscoll. Plus the first listener...

The final listener questions episode of Better at Work, Season 4. This week is Cathal and Annette closing out the season's questions before next week's wrap, with the stories that stuck with them and a look ahead to Season 5. Annette shares the story of Pauline Wald, a banking executive who walked 2,000 kilometres across France and Spain to find what her successful life had been missing. Cathal ge...

Roger Martin is the world's number one management thinker, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, and strategy advisor to the CEOs of P&G, Lego, Ford and American Express. He is our final guest of the year, and we have split the conversation in two. In part one, Roger takes apart what most people get wrong about strategy. We begin at his father's kitchen table, where an animal feed co...

Roger Martin is the world's number one management thinker, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, and strategy advisor to the CEOs of P&G, Lego, Ford and American Express. He is our final guest of the year, and we have split the conversation in two. In part one, Roger takes apart what most people get wrong about strategy. We begin at his father's kitchen table, where an animal feed co...

Annette is in London! She and Cathal are finally in the same studio for this listener questions episode. First up, Annette's three takeaways from Cathal's conversation with behavioural scientist Leidy Klotz, author of In a Good Place. The headline: every workspace has to meet three psychological needs. Agency, growth and connection. They get into why hot-desking quietly erodes all three, the simpl...

Most workplaces obsess over paint colours, open-plan vs closed offices, and how many days people should be back at their desks. They skip the only question that actually matters. This week Cathal sits down with Leidy Klotz, engineering professor and behavioural scientist at the University of Virginia. Leidy is the author of SUBTRACT (translated into eight languages) and his new book IN A GOOD PLAC...

Q&A episode: Annette synthesises Wendy Smith's both/and thinking, Cathal reflects on Bob Geldof's recent speech on empathy in leadership, and we answer Lou's question on preparing for her first competency-based interview. Following last week's conversation with Wendy Smith (Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems), Annette walks through the takeaways that...

Wendy Smith is a management professor at the University of Delaware and the co-author of Both/And Thinking, a book translating 25 years of research into practical tools leaders can apply immediately. In this conversation: - Why workplace tensions are a feature, not a bug - What most business schools are getting wrong about leadership - The difference between a dilemma (where you choose) and a para...

Annette's back with three takeaways from last week's Jennifer Moss episode that genuinely changed how we think about hope at work. Plus a listener question from Paul, an Australian who's been working in Dublin for 7-8 years and is now moving the family home to Melbourne while weighing a career change. In this Q&A: - The Admiral McRaven "make your bed" reminder - FOBO (fear of becoming obsolete...

Three years ago, Jennifer Moss came on Better at Work and gave us a line that stuck: we can't yoga our way out of a bad boss. She's back. New book. Sharper take. Jennifer is a burnout researcher and workplace culture strategist whose new book Why Are We Here? Creating a Work Culture Everybody Wants is her third on this space and one of the most useful Cathal has read this year. In this conversatio...

What if the colleague who drives you up the wall is the one your organisation can't afford to lose? Cathal and Annette are back for a listener-questions special, picking up where last week's conversation with David [surname TBC], former Head of Design at Tesla, left off. The idea that stuck: every team has Mad Hatters and White Rabbits. The Mad Hatters bring the wild, disruptive, sometimes maddeni...

For 14 years, David Imai was a Design Director at Tesla, helping shape every car the company put on the road. Before that, GM and Opel. Today he advises the startups building the future of transport and robotics, and he's obsessed with one question: why do the best ideas keep dying inside big organisations? His answer will surprise you. Every team has two types of people. The Mad Hatter, who throw...

In this week's listener questions episode, Cathal and Annette revisit three powerful ideas from their conversation with Marcus Collins. First, Emile Durkheim's sociological definition of culture, and why Marcus uses it: culture isn't something we create as individuals, it creates us as social beings. Second, Marcus's definition of brands as "vessels of meaning," identifiable signifiers that conjur...

Why Culture Is the Most Powerful Force at Work (And How to Actually Change It) | Marcus Collins What if the biggest thing shaping your experience at work isn't your manager, your workload, or your pay, but something most organisations can't even define? In this episode, Cathal sits down with Marcus Collins, marketing professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, fa...

Your team might be too big to do its best work. In this week's Q&A, Cathal and Annette unpack their takeaways from Colin Fisher's research on what makes great teams. The number that stuck: 4.5 people. That's the ideal team size for real collaboration. They dig into why most leadership meetings are too big to actually solve anything, the goal-setting mistake Colin calls "meet m...