Global Business Professor’s latest audio interview, “Intercultural Business Skills in France,” features Julia Gaspar-Bates, senior consultant at Berlitz. She’s been with the company for 15 years.

In the 10-minute audio interview, Gaspar-Bates discusses and answers these questions:

• What are the main business challenges Americans might anticipate working with the French?
• What are the most important factors to consider when building a relationship with a potential French customer?
• Decision-making practices differ greatly from one culture to the next. How would the French typically make decisions?
• What are some tips you would give an American wanting to do business with the French?

Gaspar-Bates, M.A., is a certified cross-cultural trainer and consultant who works with individuals and groups from the U.S. and abroad to facilitate the challenges of working and communicating across cultures.

Gaspar-Bates brings a wealth of personal, professional and educational experience to her work. With nearly 30 years experience working in international business and educational environments, Gaspar-Bates began her career working and consulting for a variety of companies and organizations doing global account management, international market research, product development and translation/interpretation. In her current role as an intercultural consultant, Gaspar-Bates has designed and delivered customized training programs and seminars for thousands of executives, students and educators, military personnel and governmental and non-governmental workers from around the world. She has delivered workshops on four continents in multiple foreign languages focusing on more than a dozen cultures.

A few of her varied projects include working with a French multinational corporation to help strategize its needs for global training, designing a customized workshop to be rolled-out in 80 countries and designing and delivering train-the-trainers workshops globally to in-house staff; consulting with the United States Air Force to teach online courses to increase the cultural competence of service members stationed around the world and subsequently helping re-design the course curriculum, and delivering customized workshops on unconscious bias for stakeholders in both the public and private sectors. Currently, Gaspar-Bates acts an as adviser to the World Bank to further develop its intercultural programing.

Gaspar-Bates has been an adjunct professor at The George Washington University since 2007, where she teaches a graduate-level course titled “Designing and Implementing Cross-Cultural Training Programs” and also has taught at University of Maryland.

She served as Executive Coordinator for SIETAR’s (Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research) Washington, D.C., chapter from 2007-’10, co-chaired the SIETAR USA Annual Conference in 2013 and currently serves on SIETAR USA’s board of directors. She is an active member of the French-American Chamber of Commerce of Washington, D.C. She frequently presents on intercultural topics at conferences and for professional groups. Gaspar-Bates also writes a column for the Hyattsville Life & Times newspaper, entitled “Cultural Connections.”