Dfeature
ouglas Stone is the best-selling author of the widely rec-ognized
and respected book, Difficult Conversations: How
to Discuss What Matters Most. He is also a lecturer at
Harvard Law School and consults around the world to
leading organizations including Fidelity, Honda, HP, Merck, Shell
and Time Warner, on topics such as negotiation and mediation.
He has spent 22 years with the Harvard Negotiation Project,
where he has worked on advanced negotiation applications and
the development of negotiation theory. His latest book, Thanks for
the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, was
co-authored with his colleague, Sheila Heen.
HR Professional recently spoke with Stone about the book’s
most important lessons for readers.
What prompted you to write a book on
receiving rather than giving feedback?
Douglas Stone: We have worked with a lot of organizations since
the publication of Difficult Conversations in 1999. When we ask
people about their most difficult conversations, giving and receiv-ing
feedback is always at the top of the list. However, when we
looked at the books available, almost all of them focused on how
to give feedback effectively.
While this is undoubtedly an important skill, we noticed that
no matter how well we trained someone in the art of delivering
feedback, the person on the other end of the conversation is ulti-mately
more important, because they interpret what is being said
and decide whether to do anything about it. We decided to write
Thanks for the Feedback to address that gap in the literature.
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