Monica Francois Marcel, Partner
With over 20 years’ experience leading communication, training and development projects around the world, Monica is skilled in relating with people from a variety of industry, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her specialty is helping to develop global skills and mindsets among North Americans to succeed among culturally diverse workplaces, markets, and project teams--foreign or domestic. Clients range from Fortune 100 companies and international professional associations, to world class universities and the U.S. Peace Corps.
Monica has been adjunct faculty for the MBA program at Loyola University Chicago. She has been quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and Frommer's Budget Travel. She is the co-author of the newly published "Cultural Detective®: Global Business Ethics" volume and for McGraw-Hill/Irwin she authored a university-level textbook chapter titled "Global Communications" published in Fall 2005. For the past few years Monica has been on the forefront of the India-North America cross-cultural business nexus, developing a body of original research that includes many hundred interviews with managers and teams informing best practices for fully leveraging the opportunities present when working with India. A handbook she co-authored for developing non-profit agencies in the former-Soviet Union has also been translated into three languages.
Monica's primary responsibilities lie in supporting companies in their development of a global intercultural competence curriculum to develop cross-cultural business skills and connect to the local business case for global diversity in their U.S., Asian, South African, Latin American, and European operations. Recent research regarding the complexities of remote performance management and people leadership in defined by distance and virtual technologies has expanded this body of work for Indian, North American and European teams.
Monica has also managed the localization and worldwide delivery of global compliance and ethics initiatives in seven languages for a large agro-industry multinational company, for over 1400 of their employees on four continents. She regularly customizes country-specific programs for internationally relocating managers from leading firms, and directs culture-general development for boards of directors, international businesspeople and managers across who work with multi-cultural markets and diverse employees. Monica serves, as well, on the U.S. Peace Corps’ Staging team with responsibility over pre-departure programs for Americans departing on two-year international development assignments. A frequent presenter, Monica is regularly invited to speak on the topic of intercultural competency and global diversity at major professional conferences and university forums.
Monica’s expertise and perspective grow from work and travels in over 30 countries. In the late 1990s she lived in Eastern Europe in Latvia as an international development consultant for engineering and infrastructure projects with multinational teams from the Baltic states, Spain, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Sweden, and Denmark. She has worked in partnership on several ventures proposed for European Union funding and closely with entrepreneurs, business leaders, technical experts, community organizers, and Ministry officials. Early in her career she was a senior program officer for the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Cooperative Research Program and a metropolitan planner with the U.S. Department of Transportation. There she directed consensus-building around policy and technical issues with the largest and most diverse communities in the U.S., and coordinated technology sharing, communication, and education programs with committees of international scope and membership.
Monica is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer and considers it a privilege to support the American Field Service (AFS) and National Peace Corps Association. She is on the Advisory Council for the Center for International Business Education an Research (CIBER) at the University of Illinois, and a board member of the Society for Intercultural Training, Education and Research (SIETAR-USA.) She is professionally active in the Ethics and Compliance Officers Association and Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics; the OD Network; the Human Resource Management Association of Chicago (HRMAC;) her local chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD;) and the Professional Women's Club of Chicago.
Monica earned her Master's degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, with a thesis focused on transportation and multi-organizational planning projects in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her undergraduate degree is from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A brief fellowship in Sustainable Development Studies later brought her to the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. Today she pursues on-going studies through the Intercultural Communication Institute in Oregon with a focus on best practices for global organizations. She resides with her husband Anthony in Chicago, Illinois USA.