Sheila Heen

Sheila Heen specializes in particularly challenging conversations, where emotions run high and relationships are frayed. She offers the insight and skills to tackle the conversations and conflicts that leaders face every day.

She is a 20-year member of the world-renowned Harvard Negotiation Project, a Harvard faculty member and co-author of two New York Times best sellers.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is used by leaders all over the world and has even been loaded onto the International Space Station to help astronauts collaborate effectively in that high-stakes, high-pressure environment. Named one of 50 psychology classics alongside Freud and Jung, Difficult Conversations was also named by Penguin as one of the most important books it has ever published.

In the revolutionary Thanks for the Feedback, Sheila brings a fresh perspective to our universal struggles with feedback in every organization by recognizing that in any exchange between giver and receiver, it’s the receiver who is in charge. It’s the receiver who decides what to let in, how to make sense of it, and whether and how to choose to change. The key to accelerating your own learning, as well as the culture of feedback on your team, is understanding the universal challenges of receiving feedback well. From examining our conflicted relationship with feedback, to identifying the triggers that create defensiveness and denial, Sheila’s highly interactive sessions bring insight, practical tools and concrete skills for transforming your own relationship with feedback.

A sought-after commentator and writer, her articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, the New York Times, Fortune and Real Simple. She has been featured on NPR and FOX News, Wharton Leadership Radio, CNBC’s Power Lunch and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her corporate clients span six continents and a dozen industries, including banking, defense, consumer goods, mining, insurance, IT, pharma and biotech, education and media/entertainment. In the public sector, she has provided training for the New England Organ Bank, the Singapore Supreme Court, Greek and Turkish Cypriots grappling with the conflict that divides their island, and theologians struggling with disagreement over the nature of truth and God.

Sheila is a graduate of Occidental College and Harvard Law School. She is schooled in negotiation daily by her three children.