MGB225 Intercultural Communication and Negotiation Skills - Individual Reflection Assignment Help

Introduction

My reflection is on the operation paradrop simulation activity that we did, in which the scenario was provided to us. Operation Paradrop is a start-up company, which was formed to serve the patients in outer suburbs of Australia, specially the regional areas. Accessing such areas on short time period to deliver medical supplies is not easy and very time consuming. So to address such issue, Paradrop was formed that will deliver medical supplies to people through drone. Drone technology will come handy in delivering the medical supplies to people living in outer suburbs in a short period of time. A new idea is also being proposed by operation paradrop that is to extend the business to Medicare as doing that will subsidise partial costs of medicine and equipment’s. As for this very reason, the operation paradrop team aims to hire the trained professionals to efficiently and effectively deliver the blood to rural areas of Australia. 

Reflection on critical incidents

To get selected for the job obviously it wasn’t that easy, as there were other candidates and teams who applied for the job. However, it was more of a demanding aspect to get selected and get on board with operation paradrop. To be selected it required a lot of skills and technical aspects from individuals. On top of that, it was the negotiation skill that comes handy for this selection. Apart from that there were few critical events that took place through out the simulation that will be reflected on as well. 

Australia is a country that considers any discrimination that is made on the basis of age, gender and race. I initially felt that cultural background would be an issue for my selection as I am not from the same culture so communicating properly and having open communication was another issue that I was facing. Conveying my point to the person responsible for hiring all the candidates was not easy at all. However to overcome this issue I personally made use of different negotiation skills that I learned through out the course. I remembered how to use power in negotiation. Based on the perceptual importance of power, I was feeling that I had less power as compare to other’s mainly because of my cultural difference. However, I quickly realised that it cannot be the fact and if I communicate properly and have open communication with the other person my chances will be equal as compare to others. I used my personal source to use the power, as it was me who had to overcome my personal weakness. To do so, I had to be in the right frame of mind; psychologically I had to be strong and positive. Based on the Unitarian ideological framework, the interest of individual and society has to be one, which was pretty much the same situation in this case (Fisher, R., Ury, W. L., & Patton, B, 2011). As I wanted to prove myself as the best and strong candidate for the operation paradrop, as I am not only passionate about my role in helping the society but I have the technical skills as well. 

Another aspect that came handy throughout the whole stimulation and helped me in better negotiating with operation paradrop is the communication approach that I took. I made sure that an open communication strategy is adopted and the receiver of the message should and must receive my message clearly. By doing that, it will help be in negotiating with the other person. The reason I made sure that the communication-taking place is open, is primarily because of the fact that initially was struggling to understand my point of view. The difference in the culture and English not being my first language it was not that easy for me to convey my message and bring the other person to my terms or able to meet in between. Encoding of the message and decoding of the messages are two different things, and both are equally important (Deresky, 2011).