Elaine Lin Hering

With organizations facing constant disruption, from AI-driven transformation and hybrid work to rising employee disengagement and increasing pressure to innovate, leaders can no longer afford cultures where people stay silent. The ability to surface honest feedback, challenge assumptions, navigate disagreement, and draw out the best ideas across a team has become a strategic advantage. Elaine Lin Hering helps organizations do exactly that.

A speaker, facilitator, and former lecturer at Harvard Law School, Hering works with senior leaders to solve one of the most persistent and costly problems in business: why people do not say what needs to be said. Her work sits at the intersection of communication, collaboration, conflict management, and leadership. She helps organizations understand how silence – whether driven by fear, power dynamics, culture, or habit – undermines innovation, slows decision-making, and prevents teams from performing at their best.

Hering is the USA Today bestselling author of “Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully” (Penguin Random House, 2024), a book that has been translated into more than 10 languages and adopted by organizations seeking to create cultures where people contribute fully. A former managing partner at a global leadership development firm, she has taught executive education programs at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, served as Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program, and taught as a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. In 2025, she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar class and recognized among the Top 30 Global Management Thinkers.

Hering’s central insight is both simple and urgent: most organizations do not have a talent problem – they have a silence problem. Leaders often tell people to “speak up,” yet fail to address the real and perceived costs of doing so. Employees stay quiet when they worry they will be dismissed, penalized, misunderstood, or labeled difficult. The result is that critical information goes unsaid, bad ideas move forward unchecked, and organizations lose the very perspectives they need most. Hering gives leaders a practical framework for reversing that pattern.

How to Lead Through Silence, Uncertainty, and Change

In periods of transformation, organizations need people who can raise concerns early, adapt quickly, and challenge outdated assumptions. Yet these are often the moments when silence becomes most dangerous. During restructuring, AI implementation, market volatility, or cultural change, employees frequently hold back their concerns because they do not want to appear resistant, uninformed, or out of step.

Drawing on more than 15 years of executive coaching, facilitation, and negotiation work, Hering helps leaders recognize the hidden ways silence shows up inside organizations. She demonstrates why the common advice to “just speak up” fails, especially for women, underrepresented employees, and leaders operating in environments shaped by power differences. Instead, she shows how leaders can create the conditions that make candor possible.

Her work is grounded in thousands of confidential conversations with executives, teams, and managers across industries. She has coached leaders through moments of organizational change, facilitated difficult conversations between senior teams, and helped companies navigate the tensions that arise when speed, performance, and inclusion collide. After hearing Hering, leaders leave with a clearer understanding of how to identify the signals of silence, invite more honest dialogue, and create cultures where critical information reaches the people who need to hear it.

Building Cultures Where the Best Ideas Win

Many organizations believe they have a collaboration problem when in fact they have a communication problem. The loudest voices dominate, the same people contribute repeatedly, and teams talk about one another rather than to one another. As a result, innovation slows, conflict becomes unproductive, and valuable talent remains untapped.

Hering challenges leaders to rethink what it means to create an inclusive, high-performing culture. Building on more than two decades of work influenced by the Harvard Negotiation Project and the principles behind “Getting to Yes,” she shows that effective collaboration is not about avoiding conflict. It is about learning how to surface disagreement productively, give and receive feedback more effectively, and create the kind of trust that allows people to take risks.

Her sessions equip leaders with practical tools for improving how teams communicate under pressure. She teaches leaders how to surface the best ideas instead of simply rewarding the most confident voices, how to ask questions that invite candor, and how to make feedback part of the way the organization operates rather than an occasional exercise. In a time when companies are asking teams to innovate faster, work across functions, and make decisions with incomplete information, these skills are no longer optional.

This perspective has resonated with organizations ranging from American Express, Chevron, Google, IBM, Merck, Nike, Novartis, PayPal, Pixar, Salesforce, Shell, and Workday to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Red Cross. Hering has worked with coal miners at BHP Billiton, microfinance organizers in East Africa, mental health professionals in China, and senior executives in Fortune 100 companies. Having worked on six continents and equipped more than 350,000 leaders, she is known for her ability to help people communicate across differences in power, culture, race, gender, and identity.

Why Most Organizations Get Communication Wrong

Leaders often assume communication is a matter of confidence or personality. Hering argues that the real issue is structural. Organizations unintentionally reward silence by praising compliance, punishing dissent, or creating environments where only certain voices are heard. Leaders then wonder why employees disengage, why innovation stalls, or why problems emerge too late.

Hering’s work helps leaders move beyond surface-level communication training to address the deeper dynamics shaping behavior. She teaches leaders to recognize the assumptions, incentives, and habits that keep people quiet—and then replace them with systems that encourage people to contribute. Her keynotes and workshops are especially valuable for organizations navigating succession planning, leadership development, culture change, post-merger integration, and efforts to build more resilient and adaptive teams.

Because her work is rooted in real organizational challenges, Hering is as effective with a room of hundreds as she is with an intimate senior leadership team. She customizes every engagement around the audience’s specific business pressures and strategic priorities. Clients consistently note that she combines intellectual rigor with practical application, delivering not only insight but also tools leaders can use immediately.

Hering’s ideas have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Forbes, McKinsey, Fast Company, NPR, and Rotman. Her work has become increasingly relevant as leaders confront the realities of AI, distributed teams, economic uncertainty, and rapidly shifting expectations about leadership and culture. In each of these contexts, the organizations that will succeed are those that can adapt quickly, learn faster, and hear what others miss.

For organizations seeking to build stronger leadership, more candid cultures, and teams capable of navigating uncertainty with confidence, Elaine Lin Hering offers a timely and practical perspective. Her work is especially valuable for Fortune 100 companies, leadership development programs, women’s leadership initiatives, executive communications teams, and organizations undergoing significant change. Audiences leave with a deeper understanding of why people stay silent, a clearer strategy for changing that pattern, and the tools to create workplaces where people speak up, collaborate more effectively, and perform at a higher level.

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Elaine Lin Hering is a speaker, facilitator, and former lecturer at Harvard Law School who helps leaders solve one of the most persistent challenges in organizations: why people do not say what needs to be said. Her work focuses on communication, collaboration, conflict management, and the hidden patterns of silence that prevent teams from surfacing their best ideas. Working at the intersection of leadership, negotiation, and organizational behavior, Hering equips leaders to communicate with greater clarity, invite more honest dialogue, and build cultures where people contribute rather than hold back.

Hering is the USA Today bestselling author of “Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully” (Penguin Random House, 2024), which has been translated into more than 10 languages. In the book, she argues that telling people to “just speak up” is not enough. Organizations must understand the real and perceived costs of speaking candidly and create the conditions that make honest communication possible.

A former managing partner at a global leadership development firm, Hering has spent more than 15 years teaching, speaking, and advising across industries and around the world. She has worked on six continents and equipped more than 350,000 leaders through keynote speeches, executive education programs, workshops, and coaching. Her clients include American Express, Chevron, Google, IBM, Merck, Nike, Novartis, PayPal, Pixar, Salesforce, Shell, Workday, the Red Cross, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Hering has taught executive education at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She served as Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program and later taught negotiation, mediation, and conflict management as a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. She also taught negotiation and mediation at Monash Law School in Australia.

Her speaking and advisory work centers on practical leadership issues, including speaking up, navigating productive conflict, improving feedback, and helping teams move from apathy to action. Whether addressing a large conference audience or working with a senior leadership team, Hering combines research, strategic insight, and practical tools leaders can use immediately. Participants leave with the ability to surface the best ideas instead of only the loudest voices, communicate more effectively in difficult moments, and create environments where people work with one another rather than around one another.

Hering’s work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, Forbes, McKinsey, Fast Company, NPR, and Rotman. In 2025, she was named to the Thinkers50 Radar class and recognized among the Top 30 Global Management Thinkers.

Elaine Lin Hering is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.