Sheila and her colleagues have a
series of Learning Edge whitepapers called “Soft Skills, Hard Science, Real Results.” Below are some links to case studies from that series.

Case Study 113: Monkeys on fairness and team productivity
Case Study 114:
Bad apples on your team and their impact on team results
Case Study 115: Blindspots and the challenge of leader learning
Case Study 116:
What plane crashes tell us about the challenges of talking "up"

Sheila Heen

Sheila is a founder of Triad Consulting Group and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. She and her Triad colleagues are frequent contributors to Duke CE programs around the world.

Sheila’s clients include the Federal Reserve Bank, Unilever, Millenium, Standard Bank of South Africa, Tatweer of Dubai, and Merck. She often works with executive teams, helping them to work through conflict, repair working relationships, and make sound decisions together. In the public sector, she has also provided training for 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.


Sheila has spent the last dozen years with the Harvard Negotiation Project, developing negotiation theory and practice. She specializes in particularly difficult negotiations — where emotions run high and relationships become strained. Sheila is co-author of the New York Times Business Bestseller Difficult
Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Penguin 2000), which has been translated into 21 languages. She has also written articles, several book chapters, and many of the teaching materials used at Harvard and across the negotiation field.

Since writing Difficult Conversations, Sheila has appeared on shows as diverse as Oprah and the G. Gordon Liddy show, NPR’s Diane Rehms Show, Fox News, and CNBC’s Power LunchOne. Her articles on negotiation have appeared in Fortune, Real Simple and USA Weekend.

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