Sheila Heen ’93 conducted her first negotiation early in life as a child growing up in Nebraska. The negotiation involved her dad and a horse, and ultimately led to her first trip to Harvard.
For years, a pony had topped her birthday and Christmas lists, but never materialized. So, the determined 10-year-old made a bargain with her father. The terms were simple: If she saved up the money, he would let her buy the horse.
“He agreed, thinking, that’s never going to happen,” says Heen. She soon proved her father wrong. She got a paper route and, some months later, the horse. She took care of it in a barn down the road and eventually sold it to her sister so she could upgrade to a horse she could ride in competitions, ultimately winning the 4-H Western Riding Junior Championship. Later, as a teenager with less time for riding, Heen sold the horse, trailer, and equipment she had accumulated and used the proceeds to attend Harvard’s Summer School between her junior and senior years of high school.
That summer was life-changing. “It just opened up a world I didn’t have access to,” says Heen, who went on to attend college in California but returned to Cambridge to attend Harvard Law School.
“If you’re going to interact with other humans, you’re going to use these skills.”
Today Heen is the Thaddeus R. Beal Professor of Practice. She is also a deputy director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, part of the broader Program on Negotiation, where she has been developing negotiation theory and practice since 1995. In 2019, colleague and mentor Professor Robert Mnookin ’68 and John F. Manning ’85 — Harvard Law School’s dean at the time — invited her to join the full-time faculty and take responsibility for the negotiation offerings, which would soon become required for graduation from Harvard Law School. Reflecting on her career, Heen traces its roots to her 1L year when she took her first negotiation class and never looked back.
“I just fell in love with the field,” says Heen, who was struck by how the course taught her to see conflict in a new way, and by its teacher, the late Roger Fisher ’48, founder of the Negotiation Project and a pioneer in the field who had returned home from World War II dedicated to finding better ways to deal with conflict.
“He was such an inspiration, and I felt I could do this every day for the rest of my life,” says Heen, who would go on to become a teaching assistant for that class, where she met her future husband, John Richardson ’92, and to teach Harvard-sponsored negotiation courses in Spain. After graduating, she opted for a staff position at the Negotiation Project over going to work for a law firm because she knew that with her first choice, she would “wake up every day excited to get out of bed.”
Over three decades, that enthusiasm has never waned. Her work has expanded to include teaching advanced negotiation courses, workshops, and executive education programs, and co-founding Triad, a consulting firm that focuses on helping leaders build their capacity to navigate difficult issues. She has also written code-cracking books that inform everyone from political operatives trying to forge important deals with foreign counterparts, to mothers trying to convince children to wear coats in the cold, to CEOs trying to get the best out of themselves and their employees.
For Heen, the work has far-reaching implications. Whether it’s in the legal realm, where lawyers negotiate on behalf of clients, or in daily life, where people negotiate everything from salaries to dinner destinations, she says being able to listen carefully and make your point clearly are key.
“That’s the gift of this job, that I get to actually offer people analytical tools and help them hone interpersonal skills that they’re going to need no matter what. … If you’re going to interact with other humans, you’re going to use these skills,” she says.
In her bestselling 1999 book, “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most,” Heen and co-authors Douglas Stone ’84 and Bruce Patton ’84 outline those skills. The authors examine why it’s so hard to have difficult conversations, illuminate the underlying structure of all difficult conversations, and suggest steps people can take to approach and navigate them more successfully. The work delves into the psychology of challenging dialogue, including what each participant hears or wants to hear during fraught discussions, and provides readers with vital tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of emotional or defensive reactions and ways to build understanding and consensus. Now in its third edition, “Difficult Conversations” is in 28 languages and is used all over the world by practitioners, academics, mediators, therapists, and business leaders to focus on, as the title suggests, “what matters most.”
Her second bestseller with Stone, “Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well,” came out in 2014 and was based on the kinds of difficult conversations that their clients have around giving feedback. But Heen and Stone flipped the script. “We thought about it for a long time and then one day Doug said, ‘Hang on — in any exchange between giver and receiver, it’s the receiver who’s in charge; it’s the receiver who’s deciding what to let in, what sense to make of it, whether and how they are going to change.’ And that’s when the idea crystallized,” says Heen. “The challenge and skills involved in receiving feedback are distinct leadership skills, and are crucial in a fast-changing world where adaptation and learning are key to success.”
The lessons from Heen’s books and her years of teaching and consulting are reflected in her current classes, where students look to unlock their negotiating skills by analyzing the latest research and literature, engaging with classmates in problem-solving exercises, and routinely practicing in-class negotiations based on real-life situations. They also adopt the negotiation strategy Heen calls “exploration,” in which the purpose of a conversation shifts from “I want to persuade you that I’m right, to I want to understand why you see it so differently, and I want you to understand why I see it the way I see it.” That stance doesn’t mean that both parties have to agree, she adds, but it does ensure “we both better understand what the problem is, and why we see it so differently.”
Heen also has integrated her negotiation teaching into the law school’s orientation sessions for first-year students, helping them think expansively from their first days on campus. Even great advocates need additional skills to manage their most important conversations, she says. “Advocacy as a strategy for persuasion can be very helpful and effective if the person you’re trying to pursue is neutral, like a judge or a jury. But when trying to persuade someone who already disagrees with you, advocacy is actually one of the least effective strategies you can use.”
These are skills that leaders need to tackle the complex challenges we face, and the skills law school professors have a responsibility to provide, adds Heen, who loves being a key part of that process.
“What an amazing opportunity,” she says. “I get to stand at the door and hand out equipment to students who go on to run the world.”