Gillien Todd is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches the negotiation workshop and the PON Seminar on Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. In addition, she has taught continuing education courses for attorneys and assists with the PON Executive Education Program on “Dealing with Difficult People and Situations.”
She has taught negotiation and communication workshops for professionals at various corporations across the U.S. Her corporate clients have included Eli Lilly, First Data Corporation, Gap, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Currently, she is teaching courses on difficult conversations and effective feedback to senior faculty at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. At Harvard, she has taught at the Graduate School of Design and is a regular instructor for various leadership programs at Harvard’s Center for Training and Development. In addition, she has taught workshops for attorneys in a variety of practice areas – corporate, intellectual property, litigation, and family law – in the US and Europe.
As a consultant and facilitator, Gillien has mediated contract negotiations for the Portland Symphony Orchestra and the Princeton, New Jersey Public Schools; managed discussions between members of a university administrative team in crisis; facilitated problem-solving among 30 state-based gun control organizations; and led a multi-year collaboration – between Boston-area prosecutors, police, nurses and rape crisis advocates – aimed at enhancing interagency cooperation and improving services for victims of sexual assault. She has also assisted small companies and national non-profit groups with strategic planning and inter-organizational conflict. At The Citadel Military College of South Carolina, she has worked with cadets on leadership and conflict resolution skills as part of that institution’s historic transition to co-education.
Gillien is particularly interested in helping groups and individuals negotiate and collaborate effectively. Her practice is guided by theories of interest-based negotiation developed by the Harvard Negotiation Project, and by her work with Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, who teaches leadership and group dynamics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Gillien graduated summa cum laude from Yale University, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Harvard Law School.
