Personal Development Plan

Summary

                During the course, I learned that intercultural competence is an important consideration that enables one to interact effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds. With intercultural competence, one can think and act desirably when meeting with people from varied cultural backgrounds to avoid instances of conflict development. I also learned that global leaders should be culturally intelligent, sensitive, and can be mindful of intercultural communication to prevent cases of conflict within an intercultural team. Despite this, I would still like to learn how self-reflection is considered an effective strategy that aims in constructing an individual’s cultural identities.

Personal Strengths

                I have a strong capacity of respecting people from different cultures. Being open-minded, I believe that people will always exhibit differences based on their cultures. This strength is reflected by my high score on the Global Knowledge cultural assessment perspective. My desire to meet different people is also an individual strength that has exposed me to an environment whereby I can easily learn about how to develop positive relationships with people from a different culture than mine. I have made a progress in my personal strengths area in that I have advanced when it comes to engaging with others. I feel comfortable living with people from cultures that I am not familiar with unlike in the past. I always believe that with effective communication, I can master how to coexist with others despite their differing cultures. Through this, I have recorded a significant improvement in my culture and religion score.

Personal Weaknesses

                Despite having allocated significant efforts towards politics and geography, I still experience challenges in this area, and hence continue to record a negative score on this area. I have extensive knowledge of the fact that people will always behave differently as a result of their cultural background. However, I find it challenging differentiating between low context and high context cultures and behaviors due to my poor score on the political and geography perspective. I believe that my efforts focused on reading at least two articles weekly on the case of world geography and international politics did not have much effect on promoting my knowledge in this area as a result, I believe that I have the role of considering other effective interventions which can assist in boosting my knowledge in this element. Arguably, any effective global leader should have a desirable understanding of the concept of politics and global geography to overcome the associated challenges with the intercultural conflict.

Action Plan

                To ensure that I advance further in this field, I will attend at least three seminars by the end of the semester with proficient global leaders. This will create an opportunity for me to learn from experienced leaders about how they improved their politics and geography knowledge to become effective global leaders. I will combine this action with a focus on reading at least five articles on politics and geography to grasp more concepts in this area.

Practical Takeaways

                When in an intercultural setting, I plan to communicate more with people from varied cultural backgrounds to understand how I can develop a positive relationship with them free from conflicts. In the case of misunderstandings, I will focus on the use of various verbal and non-verbal communication cues to ensure that we effectively understand each other despite the variance in communication.