爱漫岛

• Tomorrow’s leaders must possess six key competencies: resilience, curiosity, humility, perspective-taking, relationship-building, and tolerance of ambiguity.
• To develop these skills, undergraduates at Northeastern University participate in an online service-learning program that immerses them in social impact projects with community partners in underserved regions.
• Students in master’s programs develop cultural agility through semesterlong consulting projects they complete with teammates from around the world.

 
As business students prepare to enter an interconnected workforce, their capacity to connect and collaborate across cultures has become a highly sought-after skill—one that is uniquely human and difficult to replace with AI. With this critical competency, known as , students are able to navigate unpredictable, uncertain, complex, and diverse environments.

Culturally agile professionals possess a combination of six key competencies: resilience, curiosity, humility, perspective-taking, relationship-building, and tolerance of ambiguity. Students with strong skills in these six areas will be globally adept leaders who are prepared to participate in and shape the future of international business. They will be valuable assets for companies that are expanding into new markets, building diverse client bases, and forming cross-border partnerships.

Business schools typically develop cultural agility in their students in two ways: They offer courses in international business, global economics, and cross-cultural management; and they provide immersive international opportunities such as study-abroad programs, global co-ops and internships, exchange initiatives, and field-based learning programs. While education abroad remains the gold standard, business schools also can promote cultural agility through activities organized closer to home.

At my institution, Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business in Boston, we are committed to providing international experiential learning opportunities through our robust global network. Students in our Bachelor of Science in International Business (BSIB), Master of International Management (MIM), and MBA programs can participate in international experiences that include study abroad, residencies, study trips, and co-ops.

But even without buying a plane ticket, students can acquire the skills they need to thrive in today’s globalized world. In-class virtual international experiences can accelerate student development—and even be transformative—if these experiences are well-designed and engaging. Many of the students who arrive on Northeastern’s campus already have numerous passport stamps, so any in-class virtual international experience needs to be a developmental stretch that gives them opportunities for hands-on learning.

An Undergraduate Experience

In my teaching, I provide students with opportunities to develop their cultural agility within two semesterlong, on-campus courses that include virtual international experiences run by outside providers. I incorporate one program into my BSIB class and one into my master’s-level courses.

In Understanding and Managing Cultural Differences, a required course for undergraduate BSIB majors, students learn about cultural values and communications. Then they apply their new knowledge to real-world consulting projects run by , a structured service-learning program that immerses students in societal impact projects with community partners in rural or underserved regions.

For each project, I divide students into teams of six based on their concentrations. Each team is paired with a participating client—generally a solopreneur or small business owner from rural Honduras or Panama. Clients join the program with the hope that student teams can help them meet specific needs in areas such as marketing, finance, accounting, and strategy. A client liaison from Global Brigades assists in translation during the client meetings and answers student questions between meetings.

When students participate in Global Brigades projects, they build cultural agility competencies, test their assumptions, and manage high levels of uncertainty.

Teams meet with their clients throughout the semester and present deliverables at the end of the course. The business problems are typically straightforward, so students usually do not find it difficult to use their skills to come up with suggestions. The challenge they face is understanding the context well enough to develop plans that will work, stick, and be sustainable. Students might have learned about potential solutions in their textbooks, but without context, these solutions often fall short on being actionable. Students frequently discover that their business ideas are limited by their clients’ realities.

For example, a recent team worked with a store owner who sold household goods and groceries in a small village in Honduras. The store owner’s goal was to increase revenue—but the owner had limited digital skills, little financial literacy, and minimal access to technology. Therefore, the students had to develop creative, low-cost marketing ideas, including training the owner in the basics of social media. They also introduced cost accounting through inventory management systems that could be handled with pencil and paper.

Afterward, a student told us, “We realized that business advice in theory often needs rethinking in reality.” A second one reflected, “We had to listen carefully to understand what would work locally, even if it meant shifting away from our initial plans.”

Another undergraduate team learned similar lessons while working with a solopreneur who wanted to expand the market for her baked goods. As one student told us, she and her teammates had to check their cultural assumptions, adjust their recommendations to respect their client’s needs, and ask many questions of the client liaison and translator.

Such learning experiences have led many of my students to tell me that the Global Brigades project is one of the most valuable parts of their academic careers because it encourages them to bridge cultural and language gaps while working under real and unfamiliar constraints. When students participate in such projects, they build cultural agility competencies, test their assumptions, and manage high levels of uncertainty. They also gain knowledge by trying, making mistakes, and trying again.

In addition, through reflection exercises, they learn to stretch and grow. In previous research, I’ve found that people are willing to move outside of their comfort zones when motivated by the spirit of altruism. That’s certainly the case for my BSIB students when they’re working on these projects.

A Master Class in Consulting

MBA and MIM students also have opportunities to work with international clients when they take my class on Becoming a Global Leader. The course integrates virtual team projects from , an organization that brings together students from around the world to work on real client cases.

Unlike Global Brigades, which focuses on service learning, X-Culture emphasizes structured team-based consulting, with students collaborating across countries. Every semester, participants include more than 4,000 students from 120 universities around the world. Each global virtual team works on solutions to address its client’s issues, such as market expansion, product development, or brand extension.

As students navigate different cultures, time zones, work styles, and languages, they learn to build trust, gain credibility, and collaborate effectively with peers from diverse cultures.

Teams are made up of five or six students, all from different countries, who collaborate on semesterlong projects. Students generally are developing global solutions for small to medium-sized clients, such as companies selling cookie mixes, apparel, medical devices, organic skin-care products, and vitamins—just to name a few. Ideally, teams will leverage insights gleaned from each student’s home market, including information about consumer behavior, branding norms, and distribution logistics.

Through these X-Culture projects, students have very realistic experiences of being on global virtual teams. Their colleagues come from multiple countries and bring with them regional knowledge, unique communication styles, diverse cultural perspectives, and varying expectations about teamwork. X-Culture’s structure requires students to independently navigate different cultures, time zones, work styles, and languages as they address their clients’ challenges. As a result, students learn to build trust, gain credibility, and collaborate effectively with peers from diverse cultures.

After one project, a student noted that “collaborating with teammates from different regions showed me that successful teamwork goes beyond just sharing tasks. It’s about listening to and respecting each other’s ideas, even if they differ from what you are used to.”

I support the X-Culture projects with in-class discussions and online discussion boards. As the semester progresses, both my MBA and MIM students develop the cultural agility competencies they will need for their global leadership roles.

Tools for Assessment

To evaluate how much my students are learning through these virtual activities, I monitor their growth through , a digital platform run by Skiilify, a public benefit corporation I founded. myGiide assesses the six cultural agility competencies mentioned above (resilience, curiosity, humility, perspective-taking, relationship-building, and tolerance of ambiguity).

Students complete the assessment twice, once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end. The resulting data provide a visual graph that shows students how they’ve developed during the program, identifies areas for growth, and suggests ideas for future improvement.

Undergraduates who participate in Global Brigades show significant improvement in their resilience, humility, and tolerance of ambiguity. I believe they gain these competencies when they adjust their approaches so they can work with clients in unfamiliar, resource-limited settings.

The graduate students who work on X-Culture projects commonly demonstrate growth in perspective-taking and relationship-building. It’s likely they improve in these areas for three reasons: They have gained an understanding of diverse viewpoints and work styles, they have learned to coordinate work across time zones, and they want to achieve two common goals—providing solid recommendations to clients and receiving “A” grades on their projects.

Undergraduates show improvement in resilience, humility, and tolerance of ambiguity. Graduate students demonstrate growth in perspective-taking and relationship-building.

From these results, I have concluded that the nature of the virtual project affects which cultural agility competencies students will develop the most. This is useful information for faculty to have, because it helps them develop in-class international experiences that match the learning objectives of their courses.

For instance, if the goal is to foster students’ perspective-taking, professors can assign them to be cultural coaches for international students newly arrived on campus. If the goal is to enhance students’ cultural humility, professors can have them participate in programs where they are mentored by professionals in emerging markets. These professionals can advise students on the realities of operating a business in vastly different cultural and economic contexts.

Students also benefit from knowing the results of their assessments because they find it motivating to see how their competencies have improved over time. In addition, they see how they can continue building cultural agility after the course concludes.

Complementary Benefits

I believe that virtual international experiences managed by outside providers can complement traditional education abroad opportunities. That’s because they provide accessible, flexible alternatives and offer three unique advantages:

• Accessibility. They eliminate logistical and financial barriers, allowing all students to experience cross-cultural collaboration, regardless of their ability to travel abroad. This aspect of virtual learning was especially helpful during the COVID lockdown.
• Immediate application. They allow students to apply classroom concepts directly to real-world challenges, making learning more meaningful and relevant. This is fundamental for successful experiential education: These experiences offer a profound lesson in the importance of understanding context as students use—and then adapt—theoretical concepts learned in other courses.
• Self-awareness and growth. Online experiences can be complemented by more traditional essays, classroom discussions, and discussion boards that help students reflect on their experiences and build self-awareness.

For today’s business students, cultural agility is essential, and virtual international experiences provide practical and accessible ways to develop it. By embedding well-structured virtual experiences into the curriculum, business schools can equip students to navigate today’s global economy and lead in complex, multicultural environments.