In our simulated conference call, four characters were the same people we selected in our business meeting. The scenario was based on the conference held by International Society for Heart Research in San Diego that we talked about in the previous meeting. The main problem was that after taking part in the conference, the company found out that the doctors or the medical professions from the Midwest didn’t know the new product at all. And the four people were discussing a solution that was supposed to be effective in fixing the problem.
In order to make the characteristic of the roll looks more like the one described in the case, again, we added a conflict between Burns and Wescott: Wescott said his department was planning to do some advertisement in a magazine in Midwest. However, Burns immediately strongly rejected Wescott’s suggestion because he thought that doing the advertisement was the responsibility in his department.
When we practiced, we proposed that Peterson asked Wescott about the suggestion first, and then turned to Burns. But when we were doing the tape record, Peterson suddenly changed his mind and asked Burns first. This change made me (Wescott) to be upset at the moment. If it was a face-to-face meeting, maybe I could had given a hint or tried to interrupted. However, since it’s a call meeting, I felt that it was much harder to interrupt someone else.
Here I want to talk about my own experience in the real life. I had an interview several days ago. The interviewer asked a lot of questions about the technical knowledge. Since it was a phone interview, I couldn’t see the interviewer’s face or expression, so it’s very hard to judge whether she was satisfied with my answer only based on her tone.
From the video, I found myself not being very natural. My teammates seem quite relax, just like they were making a phone call in their own office. Compared to them, I am obviously more nervous and upset. I kept on looking at the people sitting in front of me and also I took a deep breath for several times. I have to say that all these behaviors look awkward in a conference call.
In my opinion, the room set-up this time was not as good as last time we did in the business meeting. Since it was a conference call, we shouldn’t have seen each other’s face, not even the backs. Thus, it is better to sit back to back.
