Meet your host Cathal Quinlan
🙌🏽 Helping people be better at work. 🚀 Making change happen with storytelling. 🧠 Brain science scavenger hunter. 🎙 Podcaster. 🍀 Unusual Irish name!
What’s with the unusual name?
My name, Cathal, is a conversation starter everywhere I go. It’s Irish, so it follows different rules to English. It’s pronounced Ka-Hal, but I happily answer to Carl, Kyle, Keel, Cal, Catharl, Cath-orl, Kay-Hill, Kay-hell, Keel-Hall or anything else. My name’s always been a helpful ice breaker at work, and I look forward to hearing your version!
Corporate type…
After 20+ years in the corporate world, Cathal understands the rollercoaster of the daily grind. During a decade driving performance for Goldman Sachs in London and New York and several years leading improvement at Westpac in Sydney, he’s seen more than his fair share of workshops, strategic offsites, transformations, SWOTs, stretch targets, dramas and downsizing.
With a reputation for motivating teams, driving lasting change and resolving complex problems with authenticity and candid humour, Cathal has built an international career out of empowering people and organisations to be better.
Behavioural science geek…
Cathal has spent years devouring books and interrogating psychologists, neuroscientists and high-performance specialists to learn what makes humans tick. He’s constantly hunting down the best advice and taking it back in a digestible way for his teams and colleagues.
He’s successfully applied this advice to help people who have fallen out of love with their jobs and teams that resist change, as well as elevate high achievers to the next level of performance and enjoyment.
He’s always been the go-to counsellor for any colleague in a crisis or searching for inspiration. His colleagues suggested he call the podcast ‘Have you checked with Cathal?’ as it was always the question people asked in a crunch.
Storyteller…
Growing up in Ireland surrounded by great storytellers and wit, Cathal dreamed of being a DJ on national station RTE 2FM. Better@Work is the best of both worlds, because he can finally share his passion for betterness with a worldwide audience, interview brilliant people, and share a few yarns along the way.
Let’s take this offline
Each episode, Cathal is joined by his long-time corporate collaborator and good friend Annette Sloan for Let’s Take This Offline, a segment where they reflect on the insights from the featured guest and work through the key takeaways, as well as address a question from a listener.
With a passion for building teams people love to be part of, Annette has 25+ years of experience in senior roles across customer experience strategy, product management, marketing and risk management. She is known for delivering major transformations, market share turnarounds and solving big problems.
Cathal and Annette share their own experiences and translate the experts’ theories and ideas into practical, digestible and fun tactics you can start using at work tomorrow.
