Even the most capable and skilled consultants find at least some of their conversations challenging. They may avoid them until it is too late. Or they may plunge in and then find things go badly. This may lead to greater stress, compromised relationships, or even compromised results.

Elaine Lin knows how to negotiate this tricky terrain. She is a consultant with Triad Consulting Group, a leading international negotiation and communication consultancy, founded by the coauthors of the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Penguin 2000).

Elaine’s presentation is based on years of work at the Harvard

Negotiation Project. She will provide a framework for understanding why some of our most important conversations are so hard. She will examine common mistakes we all make. And she will provide a vocabulary for handling these situations with less anxiety and better results.

This presentation will also cover:

• How to admit a mistake
• How to say no
• How to handle conflict on your own team
• How to address scope creep, even when you’ve raised the issue too late.

About Our Speaker

Elaine is a consultant with Triad Consulting Group, a leading international negotiation and communication consultancy founded by the coauthors of the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Penguin 2000).  There, she works with clients to diagnose challenges, design solutions, and deliver programs to build management capacity in negotiation, influence, and conflict management skills. 

She has worked as a senior consultant for Conflict Management Australasia, facilitated executive education programs at the Harvard Negotiation Institute, lectured at the Harvard School of Public Health, and taught negotiation and mediation at Monash Law School in Melbourne, Australia.  Her representative clients include Shell, IBM, ANZ Bank, Philip Morris, the Red Cross, the NAACP, and various Australian and American government departments.

Her work also includes training newly elected political officials, union leaders, and instructors at military academies, as well as designing and delivering conflict resolution curriculum for youth who have lost loved ones to acts of terrorism.

Elaine Lin

Consultant

Triad Consulting

lin@diffcon.com

www.diffcon.com