Shadowing Practice: Why Great Teams Don't Need to Like Each Other - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I've heard a lot of CEOs complain in the last five years, we've lost our creative collisions in the hybrid and virtual world of work.
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And I do think most people are missing creative collisions, but it's not spontaneity.
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It actually drives the power of those.
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The reason that creative collisions work was you end up having new ideas
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when you interact with people you don't normally have access to because they bring you fresh perspectives.
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And when you have informal interaction, because you're not just stuck to a rote agenda.
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And so there's no reason why we can't structure more unstructured interaction.
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And probably the best data I've seen on this show that
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if you take salespeople and you just have them do a simple 30 -minute activity every week,
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four months later, their individual revenue has spiked by 24%.
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That is a tremendous return on a 30 -minute weekly investment per pair.
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Adam, welcome to IdeaCast.
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Thanks, Adi.
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Great to be here.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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Let's set it up.
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Give us a sense of what the book is trying to do, what you're trying to address.
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Well, I think we live in a world that's just starving for connection.
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I think people feel like they're isolated from their teams.
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They often feel disconnected from their bosses, certainly from their CEOs.
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And so I'm really excited about trying to understand how we can build and maintain and even scale our connections.
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And as I've dug into that topic over the last few years,
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I've discovered basically we need four kinds of people in our work and our lives.
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And I've come to think of them as associates, allies, pals, and companions.
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So Adia, your associates are people who fulfill your needs.
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It's a pretty transactional relationship.
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Your allies are the people who share your goals.
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You're on a mission together.
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Pals are people who share your interests and hobbies, and you just have fun together.
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And then companions are people who share your values, and you have deep affection for each other.
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And I have watched so many leaders make the mistake of saying, look, if we want to strengthen our bonds in our company,
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if we want to build stronger cultures, then we all need to be friends or pals or we need to build a company that's a family,
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which is about being companions.
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And those are not necessary steps.
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Sometimes they're even counterproductive.
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A great team and a great organization is made up of allies, but being pals or companions is optional.
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So on teams, you know, as you said, many people assume that to succeed together, we need to like each other.
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Your data suggests otherwise.
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So what really matters then for teams to function effectively?
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Well, it's not affection or even agreement.
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It's alignment that matters the most.
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And I think the evidence on this is so clear.
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If you look at the research on team cohesion, it turns out there are two types of cohesion.
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There's social cohesion, which is what most of us think of when we think of cohesion.
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It's about singing Kumbaya and wanting to hang out together after work and do happy hours.
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And then there's task cohesion, which is we say we share a purpose and we're not necessarily bonded within a group.
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We are bonded to the group.
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And if you look at the data,
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what you see in work teams and also in sports teams is that task cohesion matters more than social cohesion for performance.
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And so I think that a leader's first job is not to get people to enjoy each other's company.
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It's to get people to say, look, we're bought in to a common direction and we have a set of values that unite us.
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All right.
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So if alignment is what matters, how do you encourage that if you're a leader, if you're an executive?
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Well, I think the table stakes is to have a meaningful purpose that people think matters.
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And the way I like to start on that is to ask executives, if your company didn't exist, if the work you do weren't happening,
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who would be worse off?
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The people who come to mind, they are the reason your work matters.
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They're why you make a difference.
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They're the mission that you want.
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I've actually found in my research that when leaders articulate the impact of their mission on clients,
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customers, patients, and users, it doesn't have nearly as strong of a motivating effect as when you actually bring in the customers,
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clients, patients, or end users directly.
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Because people know that leaders have an ulterior motive.
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You are trying to convince people that their work is important so that they will work harder, smarter, and longer.
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When the beneficiary comes in, the person who's directly affected by the work,
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you feel a real connection between what you do and the effect on that person's life.
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And so So I actually think
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that a first step for leaders is to outsource their inspiration to the people who ultimately rely on the work you do.
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So another thing you say in the book is that great gatherings are choreographed rather than spontaneous.
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And that also goes a little bit against conventionalism, you know, that we work from home.
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We miss the spontaneous interactions that are supposed to be very valuable.
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Make the case that the gatherings, the meetings should be choreographed, that that's an advantage.
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Well, I've heard a lot of CEOs complain in the last five years, we've lost our creative collisions in the hybrid and virtual world of work.
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And I do think most people are missing creative collisions, but it's not spontaneity.
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It actually drives the power of those.
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There's nothing about creativity that requires us to just bump into each other.
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The reason that creative collisions worked and the reason
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that Steve Jobs designed the Pixar headquarters for people to run into each other on their way to the bathroom
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or the cafeteria was you end up having new ideas
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when you interact with people you don't normally have access to
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because they bring you fresh perspectives and when you have informal interaction because you're not just stuck to a rote agenda.
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And so there's no reason why we can't structure more unstructured interaction.
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And probably the best data I've seen on this show that
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if you take salespeople and you just have them do a simple 30 -minute activity every week,
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four months later, their individual revenue has spiked by 24%.
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That is a tremendous return on a 30 -minute weekly investment per pair.
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And all they've been assigned to do is they've been randomly paired up, one salesperson with another who didn't know each other,
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to just have lunch for 30 minutes.
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You could do that in person.
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You could do that virtually.
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Guess what happens when two salespeople have lunch together?
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They start to compare notes.
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They exchange tips.
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They learn from each other, and they get better at their jobs.
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And so I think any leader who's not just inviting people who don't know each other to chat informally is missing out.
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Now, another interesting idea in the book is that people can form truly meaningful connections relatively quickly.
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And I'm wondering, so what does that tell us about onboarding, team formation, bringing strangers together inside organizations?
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Are we thinking the right way about these things?
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I don't think we are.
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I think we're making two systematic mistakes when we do onboarding and socialization.
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The first is we wait too long.
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One of my former doctoral students, Konstantinos Kutifres, studied this, And he found that there's this waiting period between
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when somebody accepts a job offer and when they start where they're just in limbo.
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They're not formally a member of the organization yet, but they feel like they want to connect and they want to learn.
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And he found that if you accelerate your onboarding
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and do what he calls pre -boarding
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and just have the hiring manager reach out two weeks before the start date to clarify the culture,
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to say, hey, here's why I think you're going to add a lot of value here.
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And, you know, give them a sense of belonging.
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that that accelerates their learning of the culture
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and it ultimately makes them more proactive and more effective in their job
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and so i think we should we should not wait until day one to begin onboarding
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and then the other mistake is once people do arrive
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we are all about as my colleague dan cable found in research
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he led we're all about breaking people in we say look
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we want you to absorb our values we want
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you to internalize our norms we're going to serve you the kool -aid your job is to drink it.
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And that is less effective in connecting people to a meaningful contribution than if instead of trying to help them fit in,
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we invite them to stand out.
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So I love this experiment done at Wipro where people, when they are new hires,
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instead of just going through standard on -the -job training or getting sort of indoctrinated into the organizational culture,
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they're asked to come up with a personal highlight reel.
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Come up with your career peak moments and share that with your new team.
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Six months later, they have higher performance reviews
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and they are significantly less likely to quit because they were able to bring their distinctive strengths to the table.
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They felt seen and they felt valued.
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Well, so that gets into the question about do employers truly want people to bring, you know, their full selves to work?
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You know, several years ago, I think I would have said and HBR would have written, of course you want that.
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You know, that's how you build strong teams.
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That's how you get the most out of your employees.
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There is a backlash to that.
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And I think it was Mark Andreessen who said, you know, why would I want people to bring their whole selves to work?
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I just want them to do the job.
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You know, where do you come down on that question?
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Well, I think in an ideal world, instead of bringing their full selves to work, people would just bring their best selves to work.
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And if we could stop there, we'd be in good shape.
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But the reality is we're dealing with human beings nobody is
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going to be at their best for the majority of their waking hours every single day.
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I think what's much more realistic is to say, bring your professional self to work.
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And that means two things.
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Number one, I want you to deliver on your job.
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We've got a set of expectations for that.
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And number two, I want you to live by our values.
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We should have behavioral guidelines for what it means to uphold our principles and also what it looks like to violate them.
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I think fundamentally, professionalism is about delivering results, maintaining good relationships.
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And if you pay attention to what's in your job description and you follow the organization's values, you should be in good shape.
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Let's talk about the best friend question.
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So Gallup, and probably a lot of listeners have taken this survey.
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Gallup famously, in its workplace survey, asked, do you have a best friend at work?
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Which they say tracks with things like engagement and satisfaction.
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Does that make sense based on your research?
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I don't think we need a best friend at work.
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But my colleague Segal Barsade found that just having one friend at work is enough to prevent people from feeling lonely.
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So you don't necessarily need a strong connection to your entire team or multiple departments to feel like you're not isolated.
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And I think Gallup's data on, you know, do you have a best friend at work?
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We're probably picking up.
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Do you have a friend at all?
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I think this really goes back to the question of, are we associates or allies, or do we need to be pals or companions too?
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And I think that really depends on the kind of work
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that people are doing and the stability of the team they're in.
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The longer that a team is going to stay together, the more it becomes useful to have a personal connection outside your professional interactions.
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And so if you're building long -term teams that are going to spend months or years working on hard problems together,
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there probably is the case to be made
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that you want them to occasionally eat together
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or socialize together outside of the office so that they can get to know each other on a more human level.
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I think, though, that that is that is very much a secondary consideration relative to are we coming together,
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knowing what our individual contribution is and creating a line of sight between
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that and what the team or the organization is trying to accomplish.
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So I want to talk about conflict.
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And I think you make the case that conflict can strengthen relationships.
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You know, most leaders spend a lot of energy trying to reduce that, you know, hiring for nice people.
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Should they be doing the opposite?
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it?
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I don't think you should be hiring for jerks, but I have in a lot of my research over the years,
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I found that what we're really asking about is not, is somebody nice or not?
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We should be focusing on, are they givers or takers?
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Givers are people who are trying to figure out what can I add for you?
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What can I contribute?
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Takers want to know what can I get out of this relationship?
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They're all about me.
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And I found that a lot of people, they basically stereotype givers as friendly, agreeable, warm, polite, nice, Canadian.
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They think about disagreeable people as really unpleasant and they want to avoid them.
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And what they forget is there are agreeable takers in every organization.
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They are great fakers, Adi.
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They kiss up and kick down, watch out.
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Why did you mention my name?
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I mean, I'm not pointing fingers here or anything, but I think that the higher you climb in your career,
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the harder it is for you to gauge which agreeable takers are actually fakers because they are highly motivated to impress you.
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If you have power and status, they will put their best foot forward with you.
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It's actually their peers and subordinates who get to see their true colors.
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So you can't always rely on your own judgment.
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On the other side of this, we forget that there are also disagreeable givers who are vital to any workplace.
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If you're a Ted Lasso fan, they're the Roy Kent's of the world, right?
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They are dishing out tough love.
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They're asking hard questions.
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They're giving the critical feedback that people don't want to hear, but they desperately need to hear.
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And I do think we under hire, we under reward, we under promote disagreeable givers
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because we overreact to the kind of crunchy exterior
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and we don't realize they're challenging because they care and they're trying to make us better.
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And that is behavior we need to reward and incentivize.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So the model for the person who is obsequious up and stomps on people down, for me, is John Cleese,
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Basil Fawlty and Fawlty Towers.
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It perfectly exemplifies that.
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But okay, so maybe more nuanced.
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I mean, we hire for something called cultural fit, right?
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Is that a trap?
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Does that end up not giving us the kind of complementary skills and talents?
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And, you know, what do you think about hiring for cultural fit?
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I think it's a double -edged sword.
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I think on the one hand, we know that early on it can be helpful.
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So there's a 15 -year study of biotech startups,
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for example, where the ones that prioritize cultural fit over just looking for skills or star potential,
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they had dramatically lower failure rates and they were faster to IPO.
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And if you stop there, you think, okay, I think bringing people in around culture fit is a great way to promote alignment and ultimately performance.
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But then post IPO, those companies grew at slower rates.
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They basically were too homogeneous and they didn't have people who were going to stretch.
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anyone else is thinking and they were at risk for groupthink in a nutshell.
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I think the antidote to that problem is to identify your core cultural values.
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Um, my, my colleague
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Drew Carton has found that you want a maximum of four.
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If you start getting a longer list of values, people can't remember them all.
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They don't define them the same way.
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And they also don't agree on the relative importance of them.
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So we want a small number of core values.
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And what we want to do with those is we want people to fit on those.
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So if your core values, for example, are excellence, integrity, generosity, those should be non -negotiable.
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You should never hire somebody or promote somebody who violates those values.
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But outside of those core principles, instead of culture fit, you should be looking for culture add.
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The question is not, is somebody going to clone every single norm that we have here?
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But rather, are they going to enrich our culture by filling gaps and bringing things that are missing right now?
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So you worked with the U .S.
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women's national soccer team.
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And, you know, in your description, they came up with a really interesting short list of values.
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Can you talk about sort of how you sort of drew
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that out of them and what they were and what they said about, you know, what was of value to that particular team?
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Yeah, I got called in to help them improve their vibe, which some of their superstars just thought was not even necessary.
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They said, look, we should be focusing on our skills on the field, not our culture and our team's dynamics.
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I think over time, they began to believe that culture actually drives how much you get out of your talent.
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And one of the things that I did to try to help them align was I said,
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look, we're going to throw out the cliches and buzzwords that normally define team values.
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So when I initially asked them to list their values, they said winning.
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They said teamwork.
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They said respect.
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They said accountability.
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And I came back to them and I said, yeah, sounds like every other team on the planet.
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Nobody's going to get fired up.
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Sounds like an HBR article.
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I mean, it could be.
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You said it, not me.
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I wanted them to come up with language that really met the criteria
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that we use for building a collective identity in my field of organizational psychology, which is you want values that are distinctive,
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central, and enduring to your group.
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And so I challenged them to go to the stories that really defined when was the culture at its best?
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What were the phrases?
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What were the narratives that jumped out?
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And they ended up aligning on four core values that I think are much more meaningful and emotionally evocative.
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So one was leave it better.
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And that was essentially about don't leave the break room a mess.
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Try to make also the team better than you found it.
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there was, I think, a more colorful way of capturing accountability.
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And they said, look, we know you don't like testing your pee, but we need to find out if you're hydrated.
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And we also need to make sure you're not on drugs.
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This, by the way, does not sound like an HBR article.
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No, I'm glad.
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I'm glad.
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I do not expect to see pee testing showing up in many behavioral guidelines for corporate values.
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But then if you go up to the top, so we rank order them,
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Value should be rank ordered so that you know when there's a conflict between two, which one is more important.
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The top two for them.
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Number two was what they called bloodbath mentality.
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And that was a complete rebranding of excellence because they said, we want to win.
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We want to be the best team in the world.
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We want to be the greatest ever.
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But that didn't really capture what it meant to live that value.
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And I said, how will you know?
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and one of the players said well what really made this team stand out the reason
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that this is the greatest women's soccer team in history is
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we will play through blood even in practice not just in games
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so what really defines our attitude of winning is we are
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the people who would rather bleed to death than walk off the field even
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when the stakes are low and
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that is a completely different statement about the culture than we're here to win
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or dominate and then the last one Adi was my personal favorite.
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They said, don't be an asshole.
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I think it's, you know, it's become sort of a popular approach in a lot of organizations, but they codified it.
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They said, look, what does it mean to be an asshole here?
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It means no prima donnas.
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It means you don't haze junior players.
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This is not a fraternity or a sorority.
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It means you actually show respect to staff, not just to fellow players.
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And I think that really mattered to, you know, a fair number of junior players who felt like they were not being heard.
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It also made the staff feel included and welcome.
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And they ended up contributing, I think, more ideas because of that.
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And, you know, fast forward a few years, they've had a lot of player turnover.
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They brought in a new coach who's amazing, Emma Hayes.
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But they have rekindled their vibe.
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And I think coming up with the values that they were really passionate about may have been a big part of that.
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You have a great line in the book that's associated with
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that team that building a great squad is not about minimizing the differences between people, but about channeling their differences toward a higher purpose.
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How does a manager try to do that, make that happen?
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Well, I think this goes back to your question about conflict.
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There are really three major kinds of conflict.
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Actually, there are probably four.
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But for our purposes, I think most of us, when we think about conflict, we think about what's called relationship conflict, which is the personal, emotional,
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I hate your guts, I wish we didn't have to work together, and also, you smell.
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Not productive at all.
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There are other kinds of conflict that organizations actually need.
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Task conflict and process conflict are the two that I think seem to have the most consistent benefits.
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Task conflict is when we disagree about decisions, visions, and strategies.
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If we don't do that, we're going to miss out on opportunities and threats.
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And process conflict is when we disagree about who's going to do what, when.
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If we don't do that, we're going to assign the wrong roles to the wrong people.
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We're not going to have an effective workflow or cadence to getting things done.
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And so I think channeling and harnessing people's differences to a higher purpose is really about saying,
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how do we get productive task conflict and process conflict without it spilling into relationship conflict.
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And one of the, I think the easiest steps for a leader to take on this comes out of Corinne Bendersky's work.
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She shows that if you just preface a disagreement by saying, hey, can we debate this?
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You activate a mental model that says,
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look, we're actually supposed to disagree and we're okay with that and we can even have some fun with it.
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So you also write about Metallica, which essentially saved itself by learning to fight better.
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Um, you know, using that example, that anecdote, you know, what, what are lessons in how they kind of struggled,
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but then came out on the other side?
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What are lessons that, that, you know, teams and organizations can learn from that?
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I think the biggest lesson I took away from Metallica going to group therapy, which was not something I ever expected.
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Amazing.
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Heavy metal band.
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Yeah.
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Was they were, they were actually failing because they were avoiding confrontation.
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uh they had you know they'd had a couple of of particularly nasty fights
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and they you know they insulted each other it even got physical at one point
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and they were so afraid of the band falling apart
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that they started walking on eggshells and nobody spoke their minds
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and so you have this very passive aggressive dynamic uh people you know have real creative differences
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but they're not willing to voice them or verbalize them
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and i think that what they had to recognize was when When you give somebody constructive criticism, when you raise a difficult conversation,
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you are doing that as an investment in improving your relationship with them.
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Because relationships stagnate in silence and candor is the key to growth.
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I'm not talking here about being brutally honest because as the saying goes,
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people who take pride in being brutally honest are sometimes just interested in being brutal.
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and I think the goal is to be both clear and kind.
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And so one of the things that Metallica learned to do was to say, hey, instead of like this piece is crap,
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to say, I want us to produce the best possible sound.
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I'm not sure if what we just created is gonna measure up.
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I know you're committed to that shared standard.
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Let's talk about how to reach it.
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I think this is true for all kinds of conflicts.
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It's not the message that makes people defensive.
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It's the motives of the messenger.
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When people feel attacked or judged, they put their guard up.
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If you can clarify, I'm raising this because I want us to be better.
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I'd love to find out from you how I can do better.
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And I have a couple notes for you if you're open to them.
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Then we're actually allies, right?
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We are on a team trying to solve a problem together from the same side of it, as opposed to pitting us against each other.
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So we haven't talked about AI yet.
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But, you know, it seems like AI technology is taking us away from human interaction to a degree
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that we're having intimate interactions sometimes, conversational interactions with machines.
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You know, do you feel like we're abandoning connection or we're just redefining it?
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I think there's reason to be concerned that people are starting to abandon connection.
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People are spending more time alone than they have at any point on record in most Western countries.
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Not just teenagers, but many adults say they have an AI companion.
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And some of them even say they'd rather talk with their AI chatbot than with an actual friend of theirs.
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And I think the reason that's happening is chatbots are really good sick events.
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They like us.
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They flatter you.
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Yeah, they tell you exactly what you want to hear.
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It's like if your dog could talk.
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All right.
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They're wagging their tail and sticking their tongue out and you just feel loved all the time.
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And human relationships are messy.
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They are full of friction, but that friction makes us stronger.
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And ultimately it can bring us closer too.
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Because a relationship that cannot be tested is just a charade.
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Every time you have an argument with someone
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or you have a fight with someone or you take some tough feedback from them,
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you are making an investment and saying this relationship is important enough to us that we're going to keep committing to it.
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And that builds your shared resilience over time.
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It allows both of you or all of you to know we are all in on this relationship.
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We're going to do whatever we can to preserve it.
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And I think we should be more willing to embrace the messiness of human interaction,
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because after all, human connection is one of the few things that AI cannot replace.
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So, you know, I have worked for companies
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that viewed themselves as sort of politeness cultures and never in a compliment complimenting way.
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I mean, that we're a politeness culture and therefore we're not we're not questioning the status quo.
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We're not, you know, we're sort of just kind of going along.
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There's something nice about a politeness culture.
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There's something debilitating about it how do we know if we're in a politeness culture?
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And if so, how do we move toward something a little bit more real?
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I think the clearest test of a politeness culture is do
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people say different things behind each other's backs than they say to their faces?
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So are people constantly having a meeting after the meeting where they reveal what they really think?
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If so, you might be in the middle of a politeness culture.
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And I think the danger of that is
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that you are only saying what makes people feel good today instead of communicating what's going to help them do better tomorrow.
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And I think that's where disagreeable givers have a really powerful role to play.
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I think the first thing
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I would want to do is I would find the people who are good at challenging the status quo,
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but are doing it because they care about the group or the organization.
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And I would empower those people.
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I would tell them, look, I don't think we have enough dissent around here.
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I think we have too many people keeping the peace.
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I want you to challenge me when I've seen leaders do this, it's extremely powerful.
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So Konstantinos and I did an experiment
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and also some longitudinal CEO surveys where we showed that it's one thing for leaders to ask for criticism.
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People don't really know if you mean it.
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Are you gonna take my concern seriously?
410
Are you gonna be too busy to pay attention?
411
Or are you gonna get threatened and shoot the messenger?
412
And most people decide it's just safer to stay silent.
413
What we found often works better is instead of just asking for criticism, to criticize yourself out loud.
414
When CEOs say, here's something I'm bad at, or here's what I've been told I need to work on,
415
or here's what my 360 revealed is a weakness of mine.
416
They're not just claiming that they're open.
417
They are actually proving that they can handle the truth.
418
And I think that leaders role modeling that behavior has two effects.
419
One is that other people do then speak up to you
420
and you start hearing the critiques and you get out of the politeness culture.
421
But also other people become more open about their own limitations too.
422
And you start to cascade a culture where people are really invested in not just trying to look good, but actually improve.
423
And I think what's so important about that is a lot of leaders say, you know, I get the effect.
424
I've had this conversation with more CEOs than I can count and very often what they'll say is, I see the power of admitting your flaws,
425
but I don't want to do it because then everyone's going to find out.
426
And I'm like, they already know.
427
You can't hide your shortcomings from the people who work around you.
428
They are acutely aware of everything you suck at.
429
So you might as well get credit for having the self -awareness to see your own foibles
430
and the humility and integrity to admit them out loud. So, Adam,
431
you know, there's a ton of great wisdom in your book that I think it's super valuable for companies and for teams.
432
Is there something, you know, we like to be very practical at HBR and with these podcasts.
433
You know, if somebody's listening to this and thinks, yeah, I want to do a lot of this stuff, it's a lot.
434
You know, we talked about a lot of things, like something they can do immediately to try to improve the culture,
435
improve the functioning of their teams.
436
You know, any sort of quick, quick starter advice that you might have?
437
Well, one place I'd love to see leaders start is, you know, we were just talking about shooting the messenger.
438
And I think the obvious advice is don't shoot the messenger.
439
Thank the messenger.
440
I would go a step further and say it's not enough to thank the messenger.
441
You really want to make a statement?
442
Promote the messenger.
443
Even Steve Jobs understood the power of this.
444
If you go back to the 1980s, the Mac team gave out an award for the person who most courageously challenged Jobs himself.
445
And when I first learned about that, my assumption was, okay, you're about to get fired.
446
They wanted to, you know, they wanted to praise you on your way out the door.
447
But what's remarkable is every year, the winner of that award was promoted by Steve Jobs himself.
448
He understood that he could have a chilling effect on the culture.
449
He knew that he needed people to challenge him.
450
And he thought the best way to make it clear
451
that he valued that was to actually elevate the person who did that productively.
452
And I think it's worth looking around your organization
453
and asking who are the culture carriers who aren't just championing the status quo,
454
but are actually looking for the tensions between who you claim you are and who you actually are,
455
who are pushing the organization to evolve give those people a megaphone,
456
give them a promotion, give them a bigger title and an opportunity to spread what they're doing.
457
I think that's a great way to figure out how to improve the vibe in your workplace.
458
All right, Adam, that is fantastic.
459
Thank you for being on IdeaCast and good luck with the book rollout.
460
Thank you.
461
It's always fun to vibe with you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Great Teams Don't Need to Like Each Other”. This video has 461 sentences and 5740 words to shadow. The speech runs for 31:30. The speaker talks fast, about 182 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| interaction noun | /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/ | The situation or occurrence in which two or more things act upon one another to produce an effect; the effect resulting from such a situation or occurrence. |
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| messenger noun | /ˈmɛs.ən.d͡ʒɚ/ | One who brings messages. |
| companion noun | /kəmˈpæn.jən/ | A friend, acquaintance or partner; someone with whom one spends time or accompanies |
| collision noun | /kəˈlɪʒn̩/ | An instance of colliding. |
| ally noun | /ˈæl.aɪ/ | A person who co-operates with or helps another; an associate; a friend. |
| pal noun | /pæl/ | A friend, buddy, mate, cobber; someone to hang around with. |
| meaningful adjective | /ˈmiː.nɪŋ.fl̩/ | Having meaning, significant. |
| vibe noun | /vaɪb/ | An atmosphere or aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing. |
| onboard adjective | /ɒnˈbɔːd/ | Carried or used on or in a vehicle or vessel. |
| lesson noun | /ˈlɛs.ən/ | A section of learning or teaching into which a wider learning content is divided. |
| associate noun | /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/ | A person united with another or others in an act, enterprise, or business; a partner or employee. |
| disagree verb | /dɪsəˈɡɹi/ | To fail to agree; to have a different opinion or belief. |
| workplace noun | /ˈwɝkˌpleɪs/ | The place where someone works. |
| colleague noun | /ˈkɒliːɡ/ | A fellow member of a profession, staff, academic faculty or other organization; an associate, a workmate. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| stand out verb | To jut out, protrude (from a surface etc.). |
| come down on verb | To punish or criticize (someone). |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Are we thinking the right way about these things?
- Does that make sense based on your research?
- Do you have a friend at all?
- Why did you mention my name?
- Are you gonna take my concern seriously?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if we could stop there, we'd be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've heard · I've seen · has spiked |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is made · are bonded · are choreographed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who fulfill · people who share · cohesion, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 133 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, don't, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: gathering /ˈɡæð.ɚ.ɪŋ/, strengthen /ˈstɹɛŋ(k)θən/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, collision /kəˈlɪʒn̩/, associate /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, contribution /ˌkɑntɹɪˈbjuʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: interaction /ˌɪn.təˈɹæk.ʃən/, associate /əˈsoʊʃi.ət/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/
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 interaction, hire, messenger.
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.