Detroit Leadership Lab August 2026 Cohort
UMCI Detroit Leadership Lab: 3- Week Intensive
Save the Date for the Next Cohort: October 3, 10 & 24
Join the next Three Weekend Leadership Training cohort in Detroit. Space is limited. These will be held from 9am-1PM at the U-M Detroit Center.
Can’t make it? Join the Interest List for the next session!
Program Overview
This three-session leadership experience is designed for adult learners in Detroit who are ready to strengthen how they lead themselves, influence others, and respond to complex challenges.
Across three Saturdays, participants move from awareness and leadership identity, to relational skill and courageous communication, to adaptive and creative leadership under change and uncertainty. The experience is grounded in real workplace and community contexts and emphasizes reflection, practice, peer learning, and practical application.
Designed For
Community members and leaders, business owners, and skilled technicians preparing to lead teams, entrepreneurs, etc
Duration and Format
In-person, cohort-based training, Three Saturdays, 4 hours each
Program Arc
- Session 1 builds awareness and identity.
- Session 2 develops relational skill and courage.
- Session 3 strengthens adaptive and creative leadership capacity and integrates learning into action.
Credential
After successful completion of this badge you will earn a UMCI Detroit Leadership Lab Badge.
Interested in a customized cohort experience for your work? Reach out to Amy Tuckfield at [email protected].
What You’ll Walk Away With
By the end of the program, participants will be able to:
- Analyze leadership challenges through systems, bad leadership, and followership lenses, identifying patterns of influence, emotional dynamics, and power relationships instead of defaulting to personal blame.
- Demonstrate stronger self-awareness and emotional regulation by recognizing triggers, managing emotional hijacking, and responding intentionally in high-stakes situations.
- Build, maintain, and repair trust in teams and communities using emotional intelligence and relationship-management strategies.
- Communicate with courage and clarity through managing up, setting boundaries, ethical dissent, and thoughtful assessment of relational and organizational risk.
- Lead adaptively and creatively in uncertain environments by integrating values, systems thinking, creative problem solving, and tolerance for ambiguity into a real-world leadership action plan.
Session 1: Awareness, Identity, and Agency
Part 1: What Bad Leadership Teaches Us
Participants analyze lived experiences of harmful leadership using structured frameworks to identify patterns, emotional intelligence gaps, and systemic dynamics rather than personal blame.
Part 2: Detroit Case Study — Leadership Gone Wrong
Learners apply diagnostic tools to a locally grounded case, examining leadership failure through systems, power, and contextual lenses.
Part 3: Followership as Latent Leadership
Participants explore how followers enable, resist, or reshape leadership outcomes and examine their own agency regardless of formal authority.
Part 4: Courageous Leadership & Community Impact
Learners connect personal courage to workplace and community contexts and identify where ethical influence and responsible dissent are necessary.
Part 5: Self-Leadership & Values
Participants clarify personal leadership values, integrate peer feedback, and commit to a real leadership challenge that anchors the remaining sessions.
Session 2: Relational Leadership and Influence
Part 1: Emotional Intelligence — Leading Yourself
Participants identify emotional triggers, stress responses, and regulation strategies to strengthen self-awareness and reduce reactive leadership behaviors.
Part 2: Emotional Intelligence — Shaping Team Climate
Learners examine how emotions shape trust, morale, and collaboration and practice recognizing and influencing emotional climates within groups.
Part 3: Trust and Repair
Participants learn how everyday behaviors strengthen or erode relationships and practice intentional repair strategies.
Part 4: Courageous Communication and Managing Up
Participants apply emotional intelligence and followership principles to high-stakes scenarios involving boundaries, ethical influence, and relational risk.
Session 3: Adaptive and Creative Leadership Under Change and Uncertainty
Part 1: Understanding Your Disposition to Uncertainty
Participants reflect on emotional and psychological responses to uncertainty and learn tools for navigating complexity without premature closure.
Part 2: Adaptive Mindset and Navigating Difficult Emotions
Learners examine resistance to change, grief as a leadership variable, and tolerance for uncertainty as a core adaptive skill.
Part 3: Creative and Adaptive Leadership in a Changing World
Participants apply creative and experimental approaches to real leadership challenges, integrating systems thinking, cultural awareness, and modern complexity, including AI.
Part 4: Ubuntu — I Am Because We Are
Participants explore collective intelligence, community intelligence, and community power as foundations for shared leadership and action.
Meet The Instructors
Cristina Eckhoff is an experienced educator, executive coach, and business professional with over 20 years in corporate finance, leadership development, and academic instruction across the U.S. and abroad. She teaches at both the Ross School of Business and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, and serves as an advisor in action-based learning programs at Ross and the Tauber Institute for Global Operations.
Her career spans leadership roles in complex financial environments and extensive work developing talent. Having worked across international contexts, Cristina brings a global perspective shaped by diverse economic conditions and cultural approaches to business. This, combined with her deep finance expertise and passion for cultivating others, allows her to translate leadership development into actionable knowledge and strategic tools that empower professionals to grow and lead with purpose.
Cristina is passionate about leadership, finance, and critical thinking. Outside of work, she volunteers with local organizations as a Master Gardener, a Reiki master, and as a pet foster parent.
Fatema Haque is a writer, educator, and fiber artist. She grew up in Detroit and has taught at universities internationally and domestically. At the core of her work as an educator is the goal of cultivating a democratic, engaged citizenry capable of critical thinking, teamwork, and critical reflection.
Fatema currently serves as an Adjunct Lecturer and Program Manager at the University of Michigan. Prior to this role, she has served as a Dean of Students at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and Co-Director of the Clinical Trunk at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is also a founding board member and former board president of Rising Voices, a Michigan-based nonprofit dedicated to organizing and developing Asian Americans for power around progressive values and policy in the state of Michigan.
Fatema is an avid reader. She co-facilitates the Unerased Book Club (UBC), a national book club dedicated to building community through Asian American literature. As part of UBC, she has partnered with indie bookstores in Detroit to host book club meetings for Detroiters.
As an artist, Fatema creates hand-embroidered portraits of people. Her project, Bangladeshis in Michigan, documented the immigration and settlement journeys of Bangladeshis in the state. She has also worked with the Hamtramck Historical Society and curated an exhibit on the Bangladeshi Diaspora in metro-Detroit.
Is This Training For You?
You are:
- A community member interested in strengthening your leadership capacity
- A community leader or organizer
- A business owner or entrepreneur
- A skilled technician preparing to lead a team
- A professional taking on greater responsibility without necessarily holding a formal leadership title
You want:
- Greater confidence and clarity in how you lead
- Practical tools for navigating difficult leadership situations
- Stronger emotional intelligence, trust, and communication skills
- Ways to lead effectively during change and uncertainty
- A peer community for reflection, feedback, and accountability
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge and thank all the participants of our community focus group sessions for this program for sharing their time, reflections, and experiences with us. Your thoughtful engagement helped shape this program.
Naznin Aktar
Melissa Arnett
Eriyon Adams
Stacey Broomfield
Richard Brooks
Chez Burse
Myka Burley
Sandra Childs
Kelli Clark
Andrea Cole
Alonso Delarte
Brian Fisher
Matt Firsten
Vincent Fulton
Courtney Funchess
Londre Gilkey
Paul Grinnell
Jesse Iloka
Sahar Imam
Erica B. Johnson
Saffet David King
Leah Lewis
Lashawna Manigault
Frank McGhee
Cierra McFarlin
Shantilly Parks
Ric Preuss
Sharron Solomon
Justin Spencer Smith
Rose Wilson
Gail Wakefield
Members of the Employment Equity Learning and Action Collaborative