Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Faculty: Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone

Whether we are dealing with a challenging customer, a difficult supplier, an unhappy employee, an unreasonable official, or a demanding boss, we all have conversations we anticipate with dread. Gain the strategies, tools, and frameworks you need to manage difficult conversations effectively in this program led by negotiation experts Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone.

From the boardroom to the factory floor, your ability to manage difficult conversations is key to your effectiveness. Leveraging more than 30 years of research from the Harvard Negotiation Project, Heen and Stone will help you with:

• Understanding why some conversations are so challenging—and what you can do about it
• Preventing serious disagreements from crippling your organization
• Overcoming difficult tactics and effectively respond to emotions (both yours and others’)
• Gaining strategies to foster successful relationships
• Enhancing your fundamental listening skills
• Bridging the gulf of real differences in what people believe and feel
• Strengthening your leadership by confronting adversity with aplomb
• Keeping your team moving forward and on target

Incorporating interactive exercises, coaching, feedback, and on-the-spot experimentation, this program shows you how to internalize effective strategies and execute them to achieve productive conversations and the results you want.