Elaine Lin Hering

A mediator and lawyer, Elaine Lin Hering is the Managing Partner of Triad Consulting Group, a global leadership development firm founded out of the Harvard Negotiation Project. After spending over a decade teaching people how to negotiate, communicate, and speak up, she is now well-known for her cross-cultural fluency and ability to educate across power and difference. She has worked with prominent clients, including American Express, Google, the Red Cross, and the U.S. Department of Commerce, and has facilitated executive education programs at many prestigious universities and colleges, such as Harvard, Dartmouth, and UCLA. Previously serving as the Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program, Hering now teaches negotiation as a faculty member at Harvard Law School. In her forthcoming book, Unlearning Silence: The Ways We Silence Ourselves, Silence Others, and What To Do About It (Penguin 2024), she shows how silence has been normalized and used to create inequality, racism, and sexism. Hering urges her audience to unlearn the silence, to speak up to create a more equitable world, and to establish new norms.

A highly sought-after speaker, Elaine Lin Hering has been invited to speak at conferences ranging from the World Business Dialogue in Germany to the Auschwitz Institute on Peace and Reconciliation. In her keynotes, lectures, and workshops, she touches upon “speak up” culture, how to unlearn silence, and how to make feedback work. She enlightens and empowers her audience with tips on fostering and leveraging their voices in expressing their thoughts, insights, expertise, and perspectives. At the same time, Hering explores the difficulty and uncomfortableness of feedback conversations, offering a practical set of strategies and tools for navigating these dialogues. Her works have been published in many publications, including Fast Company, HR Magazine, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Elaine Lin Hering is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of California Berkeley, where she studied Political Science and Music, and Sino-American Relations at Peking University in Beijing. She previously taught negotiation and mediation at Monash Law School in Melbourne, Australia, and was a Senior Consultant for Conflict Management Australasia, helping them expand their practice in the region.