Sheila Heen
Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School · 1 appearance on the record.
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Sheila Heen specializes in difficult negotiations and feedback delivery, advising corporate executive teams, government bodies, and international organizations on conflict resolution. She is the co-author of the bestsellers Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most and Thanks for the Feedback.
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The record, in short
What the tape says about how Sheila argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Sheila Heen said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Heen: The Optimal Positive-to-Negative Interaction Ratio in Relationships Is 5:1
“The optimum is, what is it, five to one? Five to one, positive interactions to negative interactions, and it's not better to have a bigger ratio of positive and negative, like 10 to one is not better because of what you're describing. If it's 10 positive inter…”
Heen: Purely objective decision-making does not exist
“Objective decision-making does not exist, actually, and that feelings are actually really important information, right?”
Heen: Two-Thirds of Marital Conflicts Are Perpetual and Unsolvable Differences
“About two-thirds of what you fight about are not solvable. They just reflect differences between you.”
Heen: Negative Responses in Relationships Are Better Than Total Non-Responses
“The other thing I find interesting is a negative response is actually better than no response.”
Heen: Teaching is fundamentally a negotiation for engagement and risk-taking
“Teaching itself is a negotiation. You are negotiating for people's engagement and willingness to take risks and to admit mistakes and to see what they have to learn”
Heen: Early negotiation habits deepen strengths without broadening adult skill sets
“All of us have been negotiating since we were kids, so everybody's an experienced negotiator, but you're not necessarily a good negotiator because you'll tend to just repeat the strategies that are successful for you, even into adulthood, right? And so your st…”
Heen: Listening is a more persuasive negotiation strategy than talking
“And we assume that persuasion is about talking. When actually the most persuasive strategy that you can take is a listening strategy for a couple of reasons.”
Heen: Email is serial monologue rather than genuine dialogue
“When you move to email, email isn't really dialogue.
Email is serial monologue. So I'm having reactions to your email, like by the second paragraph, and I'm reading the rest of your email through that set of reactions which makes me suspect you have bad motiv…”
Heen: Email escalates conflict fastest and is hardest to resolve through text
“Email is actually the one that escalates the fastest, and typically if a
Conflict starts on email.
It's really hard to solve on email, so I tend to tell people, just pick up the phone.”
Heen: Shifting to joint contribution does not mean fault is fifty-fifty
“When we shift from blame to joint contribution, it doesn't mean it's fifty-fifty. It just means that there were choices we each made that got us here, and figuring out what those were tells us what to change and to fix.”
Heen: Difficult conversations require negotiating internal self-talk before speaking
“So you have to actually shift your internal voice, meaning that's what you're thinking and feeling in the conversation. You have to shift it first so that your first negotiation is really with yourself. To move from being focused on what I'm right about to bei…”
Heen: Difficult conversations cannot be solved without discussing interpersonal feelings
“So if we don't talk about the feelings going on and how we each feel treated in the working relationship or the personal relationship, we're not actually addressing the deeper problem.”
Heen: In negotiation, counterparties' core interests are fundamentally feelings
“So when we teach negotiators, it's like interests are feelings. What people care about, what people worry about, if we're going to get this deal done, you've got to respond to what people worry about, care about, can get excited about, can get on board with, h…”
Heen: Accessing emotions is necessary to understand personal preferences and priorities
“They have no preferences. They don't know what their preferences are and that you have to access feelings to know what you care about and what worries you.”
Heen: Naming emotions resolves meeting gridlock faster than rational debate
“I don't think it's usually good advice to be emotional, but I do think it's usually good advice to, if there is emotion involved, if you can name it and put it on the table, you can do it in a super professional way. I mean, if we're having an argument and goi…”
Heen: Responding with extreme calmness in conflict can escalate the other person's upset
“There's a funny contribution system sometimes that happens in some relationships where the more upset someone becomes, the more calm the other person gets because their coping strategy in the face of upset is calmness. So, and the more calm they get, the more …”
Heen: Voicing More Feelings in Difficult Conversations Lowers the Stakes
“So actually, interestingly, someone is putting more feelings into the conversation. Lowers the stakes.”
Heen: Difficult conversations are driven by perceived threats to personal identity
“If a conversation feels difficult, there's often something about identity, something the situation suggests about you that raises the stakes on the whole conversation. And so that's part of the anxiety that then drives the intensity of the feelings.”
Heen: The identity traits people value most dictate their hardest conversations
“Whatever those sort of characteristics that you hold most tightly are, they are sometimes also a key to the kinds of conversations that are hardest for you. Because you let yourself down and you're disappointed in yourself.”
Heen: Difficult conversations are more fruitful when aimed at understanding, not persuasion
“If I shift my purpose in the conversation from getting them to change, or getting them to apologize, see that I'm right, whatever, to Just understanding better what's going on. Like, why is it that we have such a hard time with this? That conversation is much …”
Heen: Failure in difficult conversations means learning nothing, not lacking a solution
“Because not figuring out a solution isn't failing. Failing is not learning anything new about the other person.”
Roger Fisher was the sole survivor among six college roommates in WWII
“He fought in World War II And in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, and when he came home from the war, he found that of the six college roommates who started college together, and at the end of that first year they stopped out, it was called, to go to wa…”
Heen: Asking questions to understand counterparty interests is essential for effective negotiation
“You're trying to teach them what we would call second position skills. Can you step into someone else's shoes and imagine what the world looks like to them and what they care about and what their priorities are? And not that you're supposed to guess accurately…”
Heen: Childhood Dynamics Create an Individual's 'Emotional Footprint'
“One of the things we talk about in the book is this idea that we each have an emotional footprint. And the idea behind that is that we all grow up learning which feelings are okay to talk about, and which you learn quickly are better left alone.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #57 Sheila Heen: Decoding Difficult Conversations | May 15, 2019 | 58m |