Shadowing Practice: Collaborating at work: The collaboration skills you need to succeed - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Hello, I'm Andrew Campbell and this video is about collaborative skills.
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Hello, I'm Andrew Campbell and this video is about collaborative skills.
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So this is collaboration skills working with people across organisational boundaries,
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people who you are not in the same building with,
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particularly in an intimate team with.
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I've got with me Howell Schroeder here,
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and Howell and I have been working closely on this issue for quite a while now,
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and we want to share with you some of the skills which we think are critical to being good at collaboration.
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So the first is think relationships.
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Now, there's a tool called the Relationship Map,
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which we have another video about,
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and this is a critical tool for helping you think about relationships.
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So what is the value to you of the relationship?
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What is the value to them of the relationship or the other person?
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What is the type of relationship?
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And how much trust is there in the relationship?
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So the relationship map is an important tool here.
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Second is building trust.
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So as you work on the relationship,
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what you're trying to do is to build up feelings of goodwill between you
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and the other person so that the relationship works more smoothly.
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Hal?
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So Andrew, thank you for that.
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So when we're thinking about relationships,
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I want you to encourage you to have in mind a particular sort of attitude to it.
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And this attitude is built on the,
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or drawn from the work of a guy called Martin Novak,
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who's an evolutionary biologist and mathematician,
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spent years of his life studying this at Oxford,
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Princeton, and now at Harvard, I think.
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And after years of study,
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and after an awful lot of maths,
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he has come up with three basic principles and those principles are when you're thinking about relationships be optimistic.
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Start in when you're imagining to yourself and thinking to yourself get into the mindset this relationship is going to work.
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The second is be generous.
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How can I signal to the other party to this relationship
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that actually this relationship is going to work and be productive
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and I want to invest it I'm prepared to invest into it to make sure
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that it does work and it gets off onto the right foot.
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And thirdly he suggests be forgiving.
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Sometimes, you know, with the best of intentions,
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we miss signal to one another,
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and we can misinterpret what the other people are doing.
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We think, oh, well, it's all,
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you know, he wants to shaft me or whatever it is.
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Often that's not the case.
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Misunderstanding is far more frequent.
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So set out with that mindset in mind,
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be optimistic, be generous and be forgiving.
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And the second point is,
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as you're thinking about this,
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spend a bit of time getting to know yourself.
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Invest a bit of time in knowing yourself and what your approach is to these things.
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And here we'd encourage you to have a look at the the Kilman inventory.
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You can do that online.
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There's a reference to it at the at the end of the video so you'll see that.
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You remember, you'll probably be familiar with this that Thomas Kilman did a lot of research in this area,
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tens of thousands of these inventories distributed over time,
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very good research base, and he looks at those two elements.
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He looks at the degree to which we want to be assertive in our relationships
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and the degree to which we want to be cooperative in our relationships.
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Now, as we know, we can all be highly assertive,
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we can all choose to be less assertive,
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we can all be highly cooperative,
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and we can all be rather the less cooperative.
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So we're not going to go into the detail of that at the moment,
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but as with so many of these instruments,
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the hypothesis is that we will have a preference for which of those sets of behaviours we deploy most often.
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And we need to be aware of that preference and have a little think to ourselves,
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actually, in a given situation,
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is my default preference the most appropriate,
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or might it be better for me to try one or other of the different styles?
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Very, very important.
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I think self-knowledge is really helpful in relationships.
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And linking to this question about understanding your own personal behavioural preferences,
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you often need prompts to help you behave in the right way in the right circumstances.
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So we all know how to behave when we go to a funeral,
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and typically we'll put on different clothes to help us behave in that way.
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If we're going to a very lively party where we're expected to be raucous and enjoy ourselves to the full,
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again we'll probably wear different clothes,
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we may even have a different routine before we go out
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in order to get ourselves in the mood and to signal to ourselves how we should behave in that different situation.
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In the work environment, we don't have such easy ways of signalling to ourselves
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that we need to behave differently from one meeting to another.
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We can't rush out and change our clothes
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or have a long hot bath before going out or have a couple of gin and tonics before the next meeting.
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But we need the equivalent prompts,
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whether it is a particular pad that you use,
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or a particular coloured pad,
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or a favourite pen that you get out when it's a collaborative meeting as opposed to a negotiation.
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Some way, or it can be a tie that you wear or don't wear,
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or some way of signalling to yourself that the event you're going to requires you to behave in a particular way.
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Tip number four.
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Tip number four is about signalling.
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Thanks, Andrew.
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Andrew can be joyously raucous at parties,
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I have to say to you.
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So, tip number four is about signalling,
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and here there's a couple of things.
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The first of those is gifts.
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As you remember, Martin Novak,
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one of Martin Novak's encouragements to us when we're thinking about cooperation is actually be generous.
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So what we don't mean by this is that we rush around distributing parcels of money to our colleagues.
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What we do have in mind is actually rather different gifts.
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There might be gifts of time,
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there might be gifts of attention,
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there might be gifts of information.
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Back in the 1920s, a couple of anthropologists,
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Martin Malinowski, did a lot of work in the South Sea Islands
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and amongst their theories was
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that the sense of community among this distributed group of islands
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was enhanced by the giving from one island to another of seashells.
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Seashells which had allegedly no monetary value but symbolized the sense of community
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and were interpreted as a very generous act by the receiving island.
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So in the same way we can stimulate
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that sense of community amongst our working colleagues today by making sure that we are,
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as Andrew expressed it, making deposits in those emotional bank accounts,
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giving people time, giving people attention,
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helping them out when they're struggling for resources
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or struggling to see a clear way forward
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and making sure they have the information that they need to do their jobs properly.
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And the second thing, so in addition to gifts,
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the second thing is around tone.
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We all know that we can be right and
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that we can be right in such a way
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that pisses our colleagues off completely or in such a way that encourages them to work with us.
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My neighbour has a fridge magnet which says when I married Mr. Wright I didn't realise that his first name was always.
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And so So I would encourage you to think,
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well, in offering this opinion or offering this piece of advice or offering this piece of information to my colleagues,
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what is the tone that I want to do that with?
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Do I want to?
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What is the sort of tone that I want to create?
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And clearly, what you want to create is a positive,
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generous tone rather than a rather dismissive and see what a fool you are sort of tone.
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We want to encourage that much more positive tone.
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And email in particular.
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I'm one of the worst offenders personally on email and can easily lose
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that feel for the other human being who I'm communicating with when you're typing away on email.
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So beware of email tone.
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Fifth tip is a simple one.
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Be prepared to be analytical.
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So collaboration skills, skills, yes it's about relationships,
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yes it's about tone, yes it's about knowing yourself,
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but also it's about analytical.
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I've mentioned the stakeholder map as being a way of being analytical about relationships, the relationship map.
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But business case, one of the dangers in collaboration is you can be working very hard together with somebody
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and the net benefit of this often energy-consuming,
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difficult work is not big enough to warrant the effort.
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So be analytical about business case.
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Make sure you understand what the payoff is before you try
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and work across organisation boundaries in ways which inevitably will be energy-saving and time-consuming.
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And then the other part of the relationship map is diagnose your relationships.
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hard about what's going wrong or what's going right in the relationship
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and and we have another video on on relationship diagnostic final tip Hal yes I'd just like to emphasize
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that point about being analytical there Andrew so it's so important whether
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or not we ourselves are comfortable with data comfortable with the business cases comfortable doing
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that sort of study and thinking about things in that way even
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if we're not we'll certainly have some colleagues who are good to convince
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and those colleagues may well be interested in the data and what the the various analyses we've done are.
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So we would encourage you to do that.
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Final tip then, getting good at virtual.
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This is covered in a separate video,
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but our encouragement to you is this.
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It is a little different.
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In fact, it is quite different.
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A lot of the information that we get comes through body language when we're in face-to-face meetings.
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Figures vary, but let's say 70-80% of the information that we actually take in actually comes from our understanding of body language.
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So we don't have that to the same extent in virtual meetings.
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So we need to be aware of that and we need to be aware of the other differences.
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So many of the same skills that we have in our normal meetings apply,
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but some of them are rather different.
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We have to pay more attention to preparation,
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to process, to checking in with the other people who are in the meeting,
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and we have to often be more explicit and more rigorous and disciplined about that.
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So it is a little different,
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and we'd encourage you have a look at the other video for a little bit more on that.
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Thank you so much.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
The video titled "Collaborating at work: The collaboration skills you need to succeed" provides an excellent opportunity for English learners to engage in shadow speak practice. In collaboration, effective communication is vital, and by mimicking the speakers, you can improve your fluency, pronunciation, and confidence in workplace interactions. The emphasis on skills such as building relationships and trust is not only relevant to the content but also allows learners to practice essential speaking skills in a professional context. Engaging with this video will help you prepare for real-life situations, enhancing your ability to communicate effectively during meetings, presentations, and teamwork, which aligns with IELTS speaking practice.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
In the video, several key phrases and structures are used that are important for understanding workplace collaboration. Here are three notable examples:
- “Think relationships” – This phrase emphasizes the importance of considering interpersonal dynamics, a critical skill in business communication.
- “Building trust” – A common expression in team settings, this highlights a crucial aspect of collaboration that can enhance teamwork.
- “Be optimistic, be generous, and be forgiving” – These parallel structures not only convey key concepts but also help learners practice the rhythm and flow of English sentences. They are excellent for improving English pronunciation and structuring their thoughts when communicating.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While practicing your speaking skills using this video, pay attention to some words and phrases that might be tricky:
- “Collaboration” – This word’s syllable stress can be confusing. Ensure that you emphasize the third syllable: col-la-bo-ra-tion.
- “Trust” – The vowel sound can vary between accents; practice saying it clearly to avoid misunderstandings.
- “Generous” – Make sure to articulate the 'g' sound at the beginning and keep the syllables distinct to maximize clarity.
Using techniques like shadowspeak, you can refine these pronunciations and integrate the expressions into your everyday speaking. By shadowing the speakers in the video, you are not just learning words but also the context in which to use them effectively.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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