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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1999
Published in Penguin Books 2000
Electronic edition published, October 2003
Copyright © Douglas Stone, Bruce M. Patton, and Sheila Heen, 1999 Foreword copyright © Roger Fisher, 1999
All rights reserved
AUTHORS’ NOTE
Research at Harvard University is undertaken with the expectation of publication. In such publication the authors alone are responsible for statements of fact, opinions, recommendations, and conclusions expressed. Publication in no way implies approval or endorsement by Harvard University, any of its faculties, or by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Stone, Douglas. Difficult conversations: how to discuss what matters most/ Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-670-88339-5 (hc.)
ISBN 0 14 02.8852 X (pbk.)
ISBN 0 7865 1102 8 (MSReader)
ISBN 0 7865 1103 6 (Adobe Reader)
1. Interpersonal communication.
2. Interpersonal communication-Case studies.
I. Patton, Bruce.
II. Heen, Sheila.
III. Title.
BF637.C45S78 1999
158.2-dc21 98-33346
Set in Electra Designed by Francesca Belanger Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Douglas Stone is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a partner at Triad Consulting Group (www.triadcgi.com), a consulting firm specializing in negotiation, communication, and conflict resolution. He consults to universities, law firms, financial institutions, non-profits, governments, and businesses large and small. Stone has taught and mediated in South Africa, Cyprus, South Korea, and at the Organization of African Unity in Ethiopia, and his articles have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times to Parents magazine. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where for ten years he served as Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He is currently researching the interplay between trauma and forgiveness, especially in the context of race, gender, or divided communities. He can be reached at [email protected].
Bruce Patton is Deputy Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which he co-founded, and a partner in CMI/Vantage Partners LLC (www.vantagepartners.com), a global consulting firm that helps organizations build their capacity to manage relationships, negotiations, and conflict (with suppliers, customers, alliance partners, cross-matrix teammates) in ways that create, rather than destroy, value. Patton has also helped structure the South African constitutional process, craft a resolution of the 1980 Iranian hostage conflict, and facilitate labor agreements for educational reform. Appointed Thaddeus R. Beal Lecturer on Law in 1987, he has taught negotiation at Harvard since 1981. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Patton is co-author of the bestseller Getting to Yes (Second Edition, Penguin, 1991) and can be reached at [email protected].
Sheila Heen is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and a partner at Triad Consulting Group, a firm dedicated to assisting individuals and organizations with their toughest conversations. Heen coaches executives facing difficult choices, labor-management teams locked in conflict, family businesses facing succession issues, and communities divided by racial strife. Her clients range from Fidelity Investments to the Singapore Supreme Court, from the U.S. Air Force to the Carlson Family, from Greek and Turkish Cypriots to The Citadel Military College of South Carolina. At Harvard, Heen teaches negotiation to students and professionals and writes regularly on the subject of communication and conflict management. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and her son, and can be reached at [email protected].
To our families with love and gratitude
and to our friend and mentor, Roger Fisher, for his vision and commitment
Foreword
The Harvard Negotiation Project is best known for a book on negotiation and problem-solving called Getting to YES that has sold more than three million copies. Since its publication in 1981, readers all over the world have been persuaded that negotiators are more effective when they move away from adversarial posturing and instead work jointly to satisfy the interests of both sides.
The “Harvard Method,” as it is sometimes called, emphasizes the importance of easy two-way communication. Yet in both negotiations and daily life, for good reasons or bad, we often don’t talk to each other, and don’t want to. And sometimes when we do talk, things only get worse. Feelings — anger, guilt, hurt — escalate. We become more and more sure that we are right, and so do those with whom we disagree.
This is the realm of Difficult Conversations, and why it is such a powerful and urgently needed book. It explores what it is that makes conversations difficult, why we avoid them, and why we often handle them badly. Although the inquiry grew initially from a desire to help negotiators, the subject has far deeper implications. Difficult Conversations addresses a critical aspect of human interaction. It applies to how we deal with children, parents, landlords, tenants, suppliers, customers, bankers, brokers, neighbors, team members, patients, employees, and colleagues of any kind.
In this book my colleagues Doug, Bruce, and Sheila take us by the hand and show us how to open the door to greater fulfillment in any relationship. They provide the stance of mind and heart and the skills of expression needed to achieve effective communication across the gulf of real differences in experiences, beliefs, and feelings, whether in personal relations, business dealings, or international affairs.
These are the skills needed to take a serious disagreement within a business organization and transform it from a drag on competitiveness into an engine for innovation. These are the skills we all can use to make a marriage more enjoyable and durable and to make relations between parents and teenagers something far better than a war zone. These skills can heal the wounds that keep so many of us apart. They offer each of us a better future.
Returning from several years in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, I discovered that my roommate, two of my closest friends, and dozens of classmates had been killed in that war. Ever since, I have worked to improve the skills with which we deal with our differences; to improve the prospects for our children’s future; and to enlist others in that cause. This brilliant and compelling book by my younger colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project leaves me feeling optimistic that progress is being made on all three counts.
— Roger Fisher
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Acknowledgments
This book draws from many wells.
The stories and conversations we share throughout the book come from our own lives and from our work with a diverse group of students, colleagues, and clients. For variety and to protect confidentiality, many of these stories are amalgams of different people’s exper
iences that shared common and important dynamics, and as a rule all identifying facts have been changed. We are deeply grateful to those we’ve worked with for sharing with us so generously the conversations with which they were struggling. It is from their openness and their courage to try something new that we have learned the most.
In addition to our own research and reflection, this work incorporates and builds on ideas from many other disciplines. Our training was originally in negotiation, mediation, and law, but this book draws at least as much from the fields of organizational behavior; cognitive, client-centered, and family therapies; social psychology; communication theory; and the growing body of work around the idea of “dialogue.”
This work began in a teaching collaboration with faculty from the Family Institute of Cambridge, who have contributed to it in countless ways. Dr. Richard Chasin and Dr. Richard Lee worked with Bruce Patton and Roger Fisher to develop what we call the Interpersonal Skills Exercise (itself inspired by a demonstration offered by psychodrama specialists Dr. Carl and Sharon Hollander) in which participants are coached on their toughest conversations. This exercise has been at the heart of Harvard Law School’s Negotiation Workshop, and of our learning, for more than a decade. In teaching this exercise with us, Dick, Rick, Sallyann Roth, Jody Scheier, and their associates from the Family Institute have taught us about family dynamics, influence, common reasons people get “stuck,” and how to care for people in pain.
We are also grateful to Chris Argyris and to the partners of Action Design: Diana McLain Smith, Bob Putnam, and Phil McArthur. Their insights into the dilemmas of organizational life and interpersonal structures have proven invaluable to our understanding of conversations — how they go awry and how to put them back on course. A great many concepts in this book, including joint contribution, impact versus intent, and interpersonal intersections, are derived from their work. They are also the source of the two-column tool, the ladder and footprint metaphors, and methods of mapping. The two rules for expressing feelings come from Bob Putnam. Our understanding of how to tell your story and get off to a good start reflects the work of Don Schön and Diana Smith on framing, and input from John Richardson on roles. Diana and our colleagues at Vantage Partners have offered many useful illustrations of how these ideas explain and help with the challenges of organizational life.
From the field of cognitive therapy, we have benefited from the research and writings of Aaron Beck and David Burns. We are particularly indebted to them for their research on how cognitive distortions affect our self-image and emotions. David Kantor, a founder of family therapy and of the Family Institute, has helped us in understanding the landscape of what we call the Identity Conversation and how it plays out in group dynamics.
Insights from social psychology and communication theory are too pervasive to cite. It is perhaps a testament to the power of these insights that many of them are no longer the province of specialists. However, we owe a great debt to the late Jeff Rubin for bringing many ideas to our attention, as well as for his unceasing support and encouragement. Our work on listening and the power of authenticity was influenced by Carl Rogers, Sheila Reindl, and Suzanne Repetto. John Grinder gave us the concept of three viewpoints, or “positions,” that correspond to your perspective, the other person’s perspective, and an observer’s perspective.
In the field of dialogue, we owe a debt of gratitude to Laura Chasin and her collaborators at the Public Conversations Project, to our friends at Conflict Management Group, and to Erica Fox. From them we have learned about the transformative power of telling one’s story and speaking to the heart of the matter, a subject on which Bill Isaacs, Louise Diamond, Richard Moon, and others are also doing important work.
For providing early encouragement and opportunities to teach what we were learning we wish to thank Roger Fisher, Bob Mnookin, Frank Sander, and David Herwitz of Harvard Law School; Rob Ricigliano, Joe Stanford, and Don Thompson of Conflict Management Group; Eric Kornhauser of Conflict Management Australasia; Shirley Knight of CIBC Bank in Canada; Archie Epps, Harvard College Dean of Students; Colonels Denny Carpenter and Joe Trez of The Citadel in South Carolina; and Gary Jusela and Nancy Ann Stebbins of the Boeing Company (and Carolyn Gellerman, who introduced us); Deborah Kolb of the Program on Negotiation; and our colleagues at Conflict Management, Inc. Our friend and associate Stephen Smith helped us develop our work with family businesses and foundations and introduced us to our agent, Esther Newberg, who, along with her team at ICM, has been terrific. We are grateful for their confidence in us and their support over the years.
We are also blessed with a talented and caring group of friends and co-workers, who put aside their busy schedules to read drafts, make suggestions, and cheer us on along the way. Roger Fisher, Erica Fox, Michael Moffitt, Scott Peppet, John Richardson, Rob Ricigliano, and Diana Smith have lived with us and the work for perhaps longer than they would have chosen. By critiquing, rewriting, or outlining alternative sections or whole chapters, each has had a significant and lasting impact on the product. For stories, feedback, and support, we are grateful to Denis Achacoso, Lisle Baker, Bob Bordone, Bill Breslin, Scott Brown, Stevenson Carlbach, Toni Chayes, Diana Chigas, Amy Edmondson and George Daley, Elizabeth England, Danny Ertel, Keith Fitzgerald, Ron Fortgang, Brian Ganson, Lori Goldenthal, Mark Gordon, Sherlock Graham-Haynes, Eric Hall, Terry Hill, Ed Hillis, Ted Johnson, Helen Kim, Stu Kliman, Linda Kluz, Diane Koskinas, Jim Lawrence, Susan McCafferty, Charlotte McCormick, Patrick McWhinney, Jamie Moffitt, Linda Netsch, Monica Parker, Robert and Susan Richardson, Don Rubenstein and Sylvie Carr, Carol Rubin, Jeff Seul, Drew Tulumello, Robin Weatherill, Jeff Weiss, Jim Young, Louisa Hackett, and many others.
Our families have spent years wondering if any such book as this would ever actually come to be. They have read and critiqued drafts, offered unconditional and greatly appreciated advice and moral support, and politely gone along with our versions of family stories, for which we love them all the more and are deeply grateful: Robbie and David Blackett, Jack and Joyce Heen, Jill and Jason Grennan, Stacy Heen, Bill and Carol Patton, Bryan Patton and Devra Sisitsky, John and Benjamin Richardson, Diana Smith, Don and Anne Stone, Julie Stone and Dennis Doherty, and Randy Stone.
We could not have asked for a better editor and team at Viking Penguin. Our editor, Jane von Mehren, is not only intelligent and insightful but also fun and easy to work with. Jane, Susan Petersen, Barbara Grossman, Ivan Held, Alisa Wyatt, and the team saw immediately what we were working toward, and we very much appreciate their commitment to put it in the hands of as many people as possible. Our line editor, Beena Kamlani, and copy editor, Janet Renard, had the courage to take on the three of us, and the manuscript is the better for it, even if we have insisted on using the plural “they,” “them,” etc. to refer to indefinite singular antecedents as a way to maintain gender neutrality. (As this usage has recently grown more common in speech, younger readers may think it quite natural. However, we apologize in advance to those who find it unusual or jarring.) Finally, Maggie Payette and Francesca Belanger, our designers, have done a great job of making the cover and text distinctive, accessible, and beautiful.
As usual, the good things about this book owe a great deal to others while errors and omissions are solely our responsibility.
— Doug, Bruce & Sheila
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Introduction
Asking for a raise. Ending a relationship. Giving a critical performance review. Saying no to someone in need. Confronting disrespectful or hurtful behavior. Disagreeing with the majority in a group. Apologizing.
At work, at home, and across the backyard fence, difficult conversations are attempted or avoided every day.
A Difficult Conversation Is Anything You Find It Hard to Talk About
Sexuality, race, gender, politics, and religion come quickly to mind as difficult topics to discuss, and for many of us they are. But discomfort and awkwardness are not limited to topics on the editorial page. Any
time we feel vulnerable or our self-esteem is implicated, when the issues at stake are important and the outcome uncertain, when we care deeply about what is being discussed or about the people with whom we are discussing it, there is potential for us to experience the conversation as difficult.
We all have conversations that we dread and find unpleasant, that we avoid or face up to like bad medicine:
One of the senior engineers at your company, an old friend, has become a liability. Management has picked you to fire him.
You overheard your mother-in-law telling a neighbor that your sons are spoiled and undisciplined. As you prepare to spend the holidays at her house, you’re not sure the two of you can get through the week without a confrontation.
The project you are working on took twice as long as you told the client it would. You can’t afford not to bill for the extra time, but you dread informing the client.
You want to tell your father how much you love him, but fear that the intimacy might make both of you feel awkward.
You recently learned that several black colleagues on the police force refer to you as an Uncle Tom. You’re infuriated, but you aren’t sure whether talking about it would accomplish anything.
And, of course, there’s the stuff of everyday life, conversations that feel more ordinary but cause anxiety nonetheless: returning merchandise without a receipt, asking your secretary to do some photocopying, telling the painters not to smoke in the house. These are the interactions we put off when we can and stumble through when we must. The ones we practice over and over in our head, trying to figure out in advance what to say and wondering afterward what we should have said.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Page 1