As international education professionals, we are experienced navigators of cultural differences. The intercultural competencies that serve us in international contexts - namely, self-awareness, empathy, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and patience - are also crucial skills that we bring to managing teams closer to home. This session will focus on leveraging our skills as interculturalists to help us manage diverse teams. Whether we're bridging generations, cultures, or divergent work styles, we'll be looking at how we can harness these skills to create better communication and collaboration within our teams.

Elizabeth Erbeznik (she/her) is an international educator with nearly two decades of experience in higher education. Her first role in education involved teaching English to middle schoolers as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Madagascar. (Had her Malagasy colleagues done a performance review of her teaching abilities back then, she'd have been placed squarely in the "needs improvement" phase.) She then went on to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. After spending several years teaching college-level French and leading study abroad programs in Paris and Bordeaux, she took a role in the Academic Affairs department at WorldStrides (originally ISA) in 2015. She loves onboarding new colleagues, setting goals, meeting quarterly objectives, and collaborating with her team to ensure that they're supporting student learning on all their programs. In her spare time, she thrives by hanging out with her family in Austin, TX, reading, writing short stories, and traveling.