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 for ideas and use humour at work.

Cathal and Neil discuss:

- Listening when you're tempted to rehearse your next point.
- Finding useful information in an objection.
- Preparing for a meeting while staying open to what happens.
- Knowing when to explore ideas and when to make a decision.
- Sharing a laugh without making someone the target.
- A small change to try on your next working day.

Along the way, there are stories about meetings, shopping lists and the everyday moments that help people connect.

Neil's book: In the Moment: Build Your Confidence, Communication and Creativity at Work.

Follow Better at Work for more conversations for the work ahead.
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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 for working through important decisions; and the bridge model for feedback and difficult stakeholder relationships. Cathal adds his own picks from the book.

We also open up the season to you. From giving feedback to rebuilding after redundancy, tell us which workplace topics you want us to explore.

Send us a question, a career dilemma or an idea for a future Listener Questions episode.

Betteratwork.net

Follow Better at Work in your podcast app for more from Season 5.
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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 and Cathal Quinlan explore what deserves a deliberate yes, what someone else could learn to do, and how to say no when something else matters more.

In this episode:
• Make time for the leadership work only you can do.
• Use Yes/Grow/No to decide what to keep, delegate and decline.
• Work through ACORN: Aim, Criteria, Options, Rating and Next steps.
• Give specific feedback without jumping to conclusions.
• Use Brag and Borrow to share progress and ask for help.
• Work through difficult stakeholder relationships and reset under pressure.

Caroline is a leadership coach, economist and author of How to Have a Good Day and Leadership Intelligence.

Find Caroline: https://carolinewebb.co/
Leadership Intelligence: https://carolinewebb.co/books/leadership-intelligence/

Welcome back to Better at Work. Follow the show in your podcast app and join us for Season 5.

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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 us can see the cost coming. Her research on self-awareness says 95 percent of us believe we can. Roughly 10 to 15 percent actually can.

Her advice to leaders is structural, not motivational. Fix the load, not the person. Remove chronic stressors at source, design recovery in, and check on the people who look fine.

Listen to the full conversation: https://youtu.be/MJ_rqzhEmts?si=CcQVF5_wyZYtgVxd
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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 you, into task conflict, both of us against the problem.

Their practical phrase works at either end of the scale: get curious, not furious.

Listen to the full conversation: https://shows.acast.com/betteratworkpodcast/episodes/69d60cb9ef4d724206d29c01

Follow Better at Work so season five lands in your feed when we return on 15 September.

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