Business
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!