LEAD.MOD6 - Leadership Workshop: Leading the Workforce Ecosystems of the Future

Program Overview

Seminar Overview

Leaders today are increasingly operating in more open and interconnected environments. Whereas leaders traditionally placed most of their emphasis on managing internal employees and operations, modern managerial responsibilities include extensive interactions with external parties including contractors, gig workers, partners, external contributors, professional service firms, and others. These contexts are often structured as workforce ecosystems, encompassing a wide array of worker types and technologies. Accordingly, leaders need to learn to manage across organizational boundaries, influence without authority, and create and respond to new types of management practices. 

In this session, students will learn to:

• Recognize the importance, relevance, and value of workforce ecosystems and the types of workers that they encompass
• Understand how workforce ecosystems, encompassing increasingly flexible structures with diverse types of workers, are created and managed
• Develop new leadership skills aligned with management practices associated with workforce ecosystems

About the Facilitator

Dr. Elizabeth J. Altman is an assistant professor of management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Manning School of Business. She has served as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School and a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department. Altman’s research focuses on strategy, innovation, platforms, ecosystems, organizational change, and future of work topics. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Management Studies, Marketing Letters, and other internationally recognized management journals and books. In 2020-21, Altman is serving as guest editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review (MIT SMR) “Future of the Workforce” project, a joint research effort with Deloitte and part of the MIT SMR Big Ideas Initiative. Before academia, Altman spent 19 years in industry, primarily in mobile telecommunications, with nine years as a vice president at Motorola. She holds a Doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard University, Masters’ of Science degrees in mechanical engineering and management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University.

Applies Towards the Following Certificates

• Leadership Development Program : All Workshops