Author

Sheila Heen

The Harvard Law lecturer who mapped the three conversations inside every difficult one, and then the art of taking feedback.

1 book on BookYol

The story and the impact

Sheila Heen has taught at Harvard Law School for more than two decades and is a co-founder of Triad Consulting Group. She co-wrote Difficult Conversations with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton in 1999, a book that came out of the Harvard Negotiation Project and has stayed in print ever since.

Thanks for the Feedback, written with Stone in 2014, is her most cited work in organizations: it argues that the skill that matters is not giving feedback well but receiving it well, and it names the three triggers, truth, relationship and identity, that make even accurate feedback hard to hear.

The signature

Heen's signature is the identity conversation: the recognition that what makes a conversation hard is rarely the facts and usually what the facts seem to say about who we are. She writes with a teacher's patience and a practitioner's examples, and she is precise about the small moves, naming a feeling, separating impact from intent, that change a conversation's direction.