Shadowing Practice: What Makes a Great Leader? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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We know that one of the key reasons why organizations aren't able to innovate, organizations aren't as agile as they need to be,
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is they don't have the kind of leadership they need.
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If you came to the Harvard Business School 100 years ago,
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great leadership was really about setting direction and making sure that people went in that direction.
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How do you come up with strategy?
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When I came almost 40 years ago, we moved a bit from strategy to really vision.
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So people like John Cotter and Warren Bennis helped us understand
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that people needed to have a bigger ambition than just the strategy what's the vision, where are we going and why?
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What I've come to see as I've begun to do research in the 2000s, yes, you still need to be a visionary, but guess what?
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Because innovation has become ever more important, that means really moving from vision to shaping culture and capabilities.
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You have to move from focusing on, okay, what's my vision and how do I communicate and get people to follow me to the future?
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Instead, leading innovation is about getting people to co-create that future with you.
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And co-creation requires a different kind of leadership.
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If you want to lead an organization and build an organization that can innovate at scale with speed,
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really leaders have three functions they have to fulfill.
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The ABCs of leadership.
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A, you must be an architect.
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B, you must be a bridger.
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And C, you must be a catalyst.
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The first role is the role of architect.
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building the culture and capabilities necessary for a group of people to be able to collaborate, experiment, and learn.
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Innovative work is not about an individual having an aha moment.
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It's really about a collaboration of individuals with diverse expertise, diverse points of view and experiences who figure out,
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again, how to collaborate, how to experiment and learn together with some speed, what we called collective genius.
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The idea here is that everyone in your organization has a slice of genius.
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Everyone has talents.
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Everyone has passions.
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Your role as a leader is to unleash the diverse slices of genius in your organization
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and then leverage and harness them for the collective good.
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How do you get everyone in the organization to understand
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that they need to work on not just what they should be doing, but what they could be doing?
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The second is B or Bridger.
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We have to go outside the organization to get access to talent and tools.
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You need to be able to bridge because you do not have the talent
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and tools you need inside your organization to innovate at speed.
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Or at scale, just don't.
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Particularly now that digital is such a big piece of it, you are always, you and your organizations are really embedded in a web of interdependencies.
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And that means trying to innovate across boundaries.
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So we see many organizations building out new units
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or asking leaders to lead units in
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which they really are serving as the bridge between the outside of the organization and the inside.
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We've been studying leaders who run innovation labs, corporate accelerators, even organizations that were digital first are finding
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that they need to partner with other digital first companies to get access to the cloud.
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Because other organizations might be better at it than they are better at it
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and they need to focus on other things that are their core capabilities.
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And then the third is catalysts, and this is when you're trying to accelerate co-creation throughout the entire ecosystem.
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And there can be a couple of reasons for why you want to do that.
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One may be that for you to do what you want to do inside your organization, you need other people, other organizations,
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to be able to innovate, because they've got to create something that you need to fulfill your purpose.
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The other is fundamentally because you're trying to just create more capability in the whole ecosystem because when you lift the whole, everyone gets lifted.
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It's when your ambition is much, much greater than your organization and you're maybe trying to change a country or the prospects of a whole continent.
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So you have to get the whole ecosystem active and co-creating if you want to do that kind of thing.
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An example would be if you want to secure yourself in your own internet service, service, then if you can help your client be more secure,
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have more cybersecurity, that helps you as well.
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So that's an instance of being a catalyst.
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But when you're actually doing the act of working across, that is where you're being a bridger.
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So these three roles are very interconnected.
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We've been studying the leader who runs the trials for Pfizer.
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Turns out that Pfizer can only innovate
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and be as agile as it needs to be if in fact their vendors are agile and able to innovate.
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And so we have leaders there who are working across with vendors
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and turning those vendors into partners where in fact we have a real connection.
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We do trust each other.
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We do know how to influence each other.
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We are willing to make mutual commitments because only when we have
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that deep connection are we willing to do the hard work
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together necessary to actually do something like run those trials in 266 days and make the impossible possible.
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Now what you see, again the catalyst role of
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that same leader is working to put together consortia of people who are in the pharmaceutical industries to go back
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and think about what are some new standards we want to set
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and talk with the regulators about now that we know what's possible.
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allow us to bring hope to patients even faster
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if we work across the industry to raise all of our capacity to do more innovative work.
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So what we see is organizations have to go outside to get what they need.
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What they're really all about is learning how to exercise influence when you don't have formal authority.
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We've got to let go of formal authority as our source of influence and power.
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Instead, we're using, if you will, being able to shape culture and capabilities, being able to forge connections between diverse parties,
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connections, real connections, where we actually have mutual trust, mutual influence, and mutual commitment.
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Don't rely so much on your formal authority as a way of influencing people.
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It's not very useful because with formal authority, if you're using that as your source of power, maybe you can control people,
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but you're not building their commitment.
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And you need commitment if you want to have people take the risks associated with trying to do something new and useful,
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particularly a breakthrough kind of innovation.
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You don't use formal authority as a way to get things done because you cannot tell people to innovate.
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You can only invite them.
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It is a voluntary act.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “What Makes a Great Leader?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: organization, innovate, leader, formal, authority. This video has 62 sentences and 1176 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:17. The speaker talks fast, about 187 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| formal adjective | /ˈfɔɹməl/ | In accordance with established forms. |
| capability noun | /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/ | The power or ability to generate an outcome. |
| commitment noun | /kəˈmɪtmənt/ | The act of sending a legislative bill to committee for review. |
| innovation noun | /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/ | The act of innovating; the introduction of something new, in customs, rites, etc. |
| mutual adjective | /ˈmjuːt͡ʃuəl/ | Having the same relationship, each to each other. |
| diverse adjective | /daɪˈvɜːs/ | Consisting of different elements; various. |
| catalyst noun | /ˈkæt.ɪ.lɪst/ | A substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without being consumed in the process. |
| genius noun | /ˈd͡ʒin.jəs/ | Someone possessing extraordinary intelligence or skill; especially somebody who has demonstrated this by a creative or original work in science, music, art… |
| vendor noun | /ˈvɛn.dɚ/ | A person or a company that vends or sells. |
| ecosystem noun | /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/ | A system formed by an ecological community and its environment that functions as a unit. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| collective adjective | /kəˈlɛktɪv/ | Formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body. |
| innovative adjective | /ˈɪn.əˌveɪtɪv/ | Characterized by the creation of new ideas or inventions. |
| architect noun | /ˈɑɹ.kɪˌtɛkt/ | A professional who designs buildings or other structures, or who prepares plans and superintends construction. |
| slice noun | /slaɪs/ | That which is thin and broad. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. |
| put together verb | To assemble, construct, build, or formulate. |
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. |
| work together verb | To be coworkers with someone; to share a workspace with someone. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | We've been studying |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've come · has become |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 21 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, we've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, ambition /æmˈbɪʃ.ən/, passion /ˈpæʃən/, associate /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/, collaboration /kəˌlæbəˈɹeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: capability /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, innovative /ˈɪn.əˌveɪtɪv/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like formal, capability, commitment.
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.