Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
I'm Connor from polyglossa.com and you're listening to episode 24 of the Listening Time Podcast.
If this is your first time listening, I'm glad to have you here.
This podcast is meant and designed for English learners who want to improve their listening skills.
I speak about one or two topics and I speak in a natural way, using natural words and natural expressions, but I speak a little bit more slowly and a little bit more clearly than the average native speaker speaks.
So you should be able to understand me a little more easily than you can.
A normal podcast made for English speakers.
But the goal with this podcast is to help you reach the level where you can understand me really easily and then you can eventually move on and listen to those podcasts made for English speakers.
Also remember that the transcript is available for each episode and you can access that in the details part of the episode.
That should be a good tool to help you understand words or phrases that you missed the first time around.
So I always recommend listening to each episode multiple times, maybe one time without the transcript, and then with the transcript and then without again, just to practice in this way until you can understand everything that I say without the transcript.
Okay, so today we're going to talk about leadership.
This is a good topic to talk about, because I think that many people want to be good leaders and have good leadership qualities.
So this should be a fun topic.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, so first of all, what is a leader?
So, a leader is someone who leads, influences, and guides other people.
If you're a leader, this means that other people follow you.
You're an example for other people.
So, obviously, A leader has a very important role in their group of people.
So, what are some examples of leadership roles?
The word role refers to some position or some responsibility that you have.
This is a role.
So first of all, there are professional leaders.
For example, a boss or a manager, this could be a leader.
I think most of us have had a boss or a manager at some point in our career.
Or maybe you're a manager or a boss.
So maybe you're this type of leader.
And And another type of leader is a team leader.
So maybe you don't have the title of manager or boss, but maybe you work with a group of people and maybe you're the leader of that group.
So in certain industries where many people work in teams, there's usually one person that kind of leads this team.
They might earn more money, or maybe they don't, but they have greater responsibility than the other team members.
So a team leader is a type of leader, of course.
And then one other type of leader in the professional world could be a teacher.
So a teacher can lead a his or her students and help guide them so that they can learn.
And if you work in a classroom environment, then you definitely need to lead, because there will be many other people with you who are looking at you as their example.
So there aren't only professional leaders.
There are also leaders in other areas of our lives as well.
For example, if you're a parent, you're a leader, right?
You have to lead your family.
So if you're a father and you have two children, for example, You are the example.
You are the person who is guiding these two people.
They look to you as their example, and they hopefully follow you.
So a parent could be a leader.
And then among your friend group, you might notice that one person plays the leader role.
That might be you or that might be one of your friends.
So maybe one of your friends is the person who always suggests an activity for you guys to do.
Or maybe that person always makes decisions for the group or tells the group what they should do.
This would be a leader as well.
So there are many different types of leaders in our everyday lives.
And there are also a couple different leadership styles.
I'm only going to talk about two of these general styles.
We hear these words a lot.
There are hands-on leaders and hands-off leaders.
A hands-on leader is a leader who is very involved in the activity.
So maybe they also do some of the work, or maybe they help you do the work.
Of course, I'm talking about a leader in a professional environment.
Maybe your manager always checks on your work and they check to make sure you're doing things right.
Maybe they help you out.
Maybe they're always there to answer any questions you might have or give you advice.
This is a hands-on leader.
And then there are hands-off leaders.
A hands-off leader is someone who prefers not to participate too much in the activity.
So, for example, maybe your manager tells you what you need to do.
They give you a task to do.
But they let you do the task by yourself and they don't bother you.
They just leave you alone and let you work.
But maybe after a while you go and report to them and tell them how you're doing.
Or maybe they come by once in a while and see if you have any questions or doubts or if you need any help, but they don't hover over you.
When we use the phrase hover over someone in English, we mean that the person sticks very close to you and watches what you're doing and monitors your work or your progress, etc.
When someone does this, we say that they're hovering over you.
So a hands-off leader definitely doesn't hover, right?
He lets you do your work, and then he'll probably check it afterwards.
So leaders can be hands-on or hands-off, or maybe they're somewhere in between.
Okay, now let's talk about some good leadership qualities.
So what do leaders need to do?
What characteristics should they have in order to be good leaders?
So I'll talk about five different qualities.
The first one is the ability to motivate followers or motivate a team, right?
So if a leader is not able to motivate the people that are following him, he's not a good leader, because obviously the goal of a leader is to help his team accomplish some goal right.
Complete some task.
And if they're not motivated to do this, then the leader isn't doing his job, right?
So the ability to motivate people is very important.
I've recently been watching some documentary style videos about Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great was a very important historical figure in ancient Greece and more particularly in Macedonia.
And he was known as being one of the greatest war leaders of all time.
Maybe the greatest of all time.
So one quality that he had was that he was able to motivate his army in battle.
And one thing that I found interesting about him was the way he positioned himself when he went to war with his army.
So at that time, kings often went to war with their armies, right?
And And many times the kings or the most important person.
They would be towards the back of the army or maybe in the middle.
And they would give commands and they would allow the soldiers to go ahead of them and fight.
So many of their soldiers would die fighting before the enemy could even reach the king or the important person.
This was a very common way for kings to go to battle because, of course, you don't want your king to die in battle.
So you want him to be well protected.
However, Alexander the Great often led his army from the very front.
So he actually went first and he led the army literally.
Right.
They followed him into battle.
And, from an objective point of view, this might not be the smartest thing, because if you're at the very front, you're more likely to get killed.
Right.
But Alexander the Great, he never showed any fear and he did this in battle.
So, even though this is probably not the smartest move, objectively speaking, this actually really motivated his troops.
The word troops refers to soldiers, the people in the army.
So the fact that he was at the front really motivated his troops because they saw that he was willing to die in battle right.
He wasn't just sending them to go die.
He was at the very front.
So his people definitely followed him, right?
This really motivated them to go into battle.
So I thought that was a really cool example of how to motivate people, right?
To show that you are part of the team.
You're not just sending people different places to go do things.
You're actually one of the team members.
So that's the first leadership quality that's important to have.
And then another one is good communication skills.
This is an obvious one, because if a leader can't communicate well, no one will follow that leader.
Right.
So the leader needs to have good communication, people skills, as we say in English.
He needs to be able to identify with people and read people and interact in a way that makes people want to work with him.
Right?
So if a leader can't do this, then his team members probably won't trust him, or they won't understand him as well, or they won't understand the goal or the mission.
There are many negatives that could result from bad communication skills.
And the third quality that leaders should definitely have is self-awareness.
When we say self-awareness in English, we're talking about the ability to understand how other people view you.
So, for example, if someone is not very self-aware...
This means that they act in a way that shows that they kind of don't care how other people perceive them.
They don't even think about this.
They just act however they want.
But if someone is self aware, then they try to put themselves in other people's shoes, as we say in English, and they imagine how other people might perceive their actions.
So this leader might think hmm, maybe I shouldn't do this, because if I do it it seems arrogant or it seems selfish.
So I'm not going to do this action.
This type of reflection shows that this leader is self-aware.
He knows how people perceive him and how they might perceive his actions.
So that's another really good quality to have, because if you're not self-aware and you're a leader, then you probably don't realize how people perceive you and they might think you're a jerk.
We use the word jerk in English to refer to someone who isn't nice.
They're mean, maybe they're a bully, they're not very nice and they don't consider other people's feelings.
So if you're not self-aware, you might be acting like a jerk and you don't even realize it.
So that's not good if you're a leader.
And the next quality is empathy.
So empathy refers to the ability to imagine understand, feel and identify with others other people's emotions or feelings or thoughts.
So if you can really feel what other people are feeling, you have the ability of empathy.
You are an empathetic person.
So a good leader needs to be able to put himself in other people's shoes and imagine how they feel.
Imagine what their struggles are.
When we say the word struggle in English, this refers to having trouble or difficulty with something.
If I say I'm struggling in my math class, I'm saying that I'm having trouble or difficulties in my math class.
So if you're empathetic and you're an empathetic leader, you'll be able to understand your team members' struggles, or the other people's struggles.
You'll understand their fears, you'll understand their desires and you'll show them that you acknowledge this.
People like when their leader is empathetic, because oftentimes leaders don't show empathy and it seems like they don't even care about how you feel.
I remember in my very first job, I had a boss who was not empathetic at all.
And I distinctly remember on one occasion I had a really big problem with my work, but it wasn't my fault.
Someone else had made a huge mistake and it was affecting me in my duties.
The word duties in English just means your tasks, your responsibilities, the things that you have to do.
So someone else had made a huge mistake and now I couldn't complete my work on time.
And I told this to my manager and he was completely unsympathetic and unempathetic to my feelings or my position.
He just told me, I don't care.
Do it anyway.
And I remember I was so frustrated when he said that to me.
I couldn't believe that he couldn't see that it was impossible for me to complete my job because of this huge problem that someone else had caused.
So this manager showed no empathy, and I remember him as being a very bad boss.
So of course, if you don't have this quality, people probably don't like you.
And then lastly, another good leadership quality is the ability to delegate.
The word delegate means to assign responsibility to different people, right?
So if I'm a leader and I have three team members and there are six tasks that we need to complete, I might give two tasks to each of those members, right?
I'm delegating those tasks to to my team members.
So a leader needs to be able to delegate because a leader can't do everything by himself.
He needs to use his team members to get the job done.
So if you're a leader and you're not good at delegating, you're probably not going to be efficient in your work.
You're probably not going to finish things on time or meet deadlines, and it will be a frustrating experience for everyone.
So the ability to delegate is definitely a skill that good leaders need to have.
So lastly, let me just ask you a question.
Do you think that some people are born to be leaders and some people are born not to be leaders?
Or do you think that leadership is something that you learn during your life?
Do you think that being a good leader is a natural quality that people are born with because of their personality?
Or do you think that anyone can become a good leader if they learn how to lead and adopt these essential skills?
People probably debate this topic and some people might have different opinions.
I think it's a mixture of both.
I think that some people naturally have a personality that drives them to be a leader, but I think that everybody needs to learn how to lead other people.
If you don't learn how to do this, you're not going to be a good leader, even if you have the right personality type.
So in my opinion, it's a mixture of both things.
All right, so we'll stop there for today.
Hopefully this was an interesting topic for you and hopefully it was good practice for your listening.
Transcription by CastingWords.
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So thank you for listening to this episode.
And I hope you'll come back for episode 25 of the Listening Time podcast.
