Describe a person you know who is a good leader

Intermediate

8 min

IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card: Describe a person you know who is a good leader. One minute to prepare, up to two minutes to speak, then follow-up questions.

An intermediate-level session of about 8 minutes. Covers Part 2. 3 prompts in total.

The card says a person you know, which rules out the prime minister and the founder whose autobiography you read last year. It has to be someone whose behaviour you have watched at close range: a hostel secretary, the team lead on your first project, a college captain, a teacher running a department. That constraint is also useful, because the third bullet asks how they treat the people they lead, and only close range can answer it — who they listened to, what they did when somebody underperformed, whether they took the blame in front of others. Leadership adjectives are cheap and interchangeable, so the substance has to arrive as incidents. Afterwards the examiner leaves the person behind: whether you would like to lead, and whether leaders are born or made, are opinion questions, and the handover into them is worth rehearsing.

Angles worth taking

Pick someone you have watched in person; borrowed examples from business books collapse under one specific question.
Answer the treatment bullet with an incident — a decision, a disagreement, or how somebody’s mistake was handled.
Name what they lead precisely, whether that is a hostel wing, a project team or a college society.
Keep one sentence in reserve for their limits; qualified praise sounds more considered than praise without a pause.
Where you stood matters — led by them, working beside them, or watching the team from outside.

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The format

Parts covered

Prompts in total

Modes

Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)

How a IELTS Speaking session works

Part 1 — the warm-up

Familiar questions about you: work, home, routines. Short answers, but not one-word ones. The examiner is calibrating to your voice.

Part 2 — the cue card

A topic card with prompts, one minute of prep with notes, then up to two minutes speaking without interruption.

Part 3 — the discussion

Abstract follow-ups on the Part 2 theme. Opinions, comparisons and speculation, where the higher bands are decided.

Your band estimate

A score on each of the four official criteria, what pulled it down, and the habit to change before you sit the real test.

What you're scored on

IELTS Speaking is marked on four criteria of equal weight. The estimate reports each one separately, because they rarely move together.

Your objective

Speak for 1-2 minutes with clear structure and descriptive language.

Fluency and coherence

Whether you keep going, and whether the ideas connect. Hesitation while you search for a word costs less than hesitation while you search for a thought.

Lexical resource

Range and precision, including whether you can paraphrase around a word you do not have instead of stopping at it.

Grammatical range and accuracy

Variety of structures as well as correctness. All-simple-sentences and all-accurate caps out around band 6.

Pronunciation

Intelligibility, stress and intonation. Accent is not penalised; flat stress and swallowed word endings are.

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