TNT ESQ: Episode 27 with Chris Colaco - CREATING A CULTURE OF LEARNING WITH FEEDBACK

Welcome to today's guest Chris Colaco!


You can connect with Chris on LinkedIn and reach out for his
brilliant work for you and your organization at
www.initiate.ch 


Chris claims that he was really fortunate to start his career
working at Procter & Gamble (P&G). Thanks to P&G’s
strong emphasis on performance and people development, he
discovered his passion for training and helping others’ learn,
grow and develop their skills; also fortunate to learn that he
wanted to be an entrepreneur.


After leaving P&G, Chris decided to fulfill one of his dreams
by spending time traveling through many countries such as India,
Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, the
Netherlands, Ireland, and Switzerland. This opportunity of a life
time helped him learn more about himself and the world. During
his travels, I met and learnt from a diverse group of people
including farmers, diving instructors, monks, elephant keepers,
trekking guides, and doctors. These individuals combined with
Chris' diverse travel experiences helped him to discover new
ideas and perspectives to help himself and others develop new
skills and capabilities.


...in his own words...


In search of international work experience, I relocated to
Geneva, Switzerland where I worked in training and development
for a large multinational company. It was in this position that I
developed and delivered training programs in regions including
Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and Africa.


As a result of my international training experience, my passion
for people development, and my interest in meeting and working
with diverse people, I created Initiate (www.initiate.ch) in
2005. Since then I have been developing leadership and management
training to help people discover how they can help engage and
develop teams beyond telling them what to do and how to do it.


One of the modules that I always deliver in leadership and
management programs is focused on feedback. I would always get
comments from participants at the end of the program stating that
they wished their Manager was in the program. I would always seek
to learn more from the participant. It was then that I started to
realize more and more that most Managers don’t give feedback and
if they do, it is delivered in a pretty demotivating manner.
Further, most people have a negative perception of the word
“feedback”. After looking into research, I saw that there was a
huge demand for more feedback and a gap in the supply of quality
feedback.


So I decided to take the plunge and create a cloud based platform
called 1 Minute Feedback. 1 Minute Feedback helps employees
request feedback and helps Managers provide feedback in simple,
motivating manner. My aim is to help people around the world
understand that getting feedback can be easy, helpful and a
worthwhile endeavor.


In my free time, I love traveling with my family and living in
different locations for a month or more. I also love learning. I
am always learning something either to get better as a person or
just for fun. When I was in Kenya, our cook taught me how to make
the perfect chapati. Now for the majority of our learning
experience, he would laugh at me and tell me that my chapatis
were not round enough to sell in the market. The greatest teacher
I ever had was my Spanish teacher. He just made learning so much
fun that I felt like I was in a class “learning”. Interestingly
it was the only time in my life where I had 100% as the final
mark and never ever felt like learning was a chore. This is what
I am doing when I work with my clients!