Gillien consults to organizations on team development, enhancing collaboration, and improving communication. She has worked with executive teams, corporate pairs, and individual leaders. As an executive coach, she helps leaders navigate their hardest conversations and understand how their own leadership profile impacts their teams.
Gillien is a Lecturer at Harvard Law School, where she has taught the Negotiation Workshop since 2001, and at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she has taught since 2016. As a consultant, she has led workshops on negotiation, difficult conversations, and feedback for executives in a variety of industries, including accounting, biotech, computer software, financial services, retail and pharmaceuticals, as well as at top teaching hospitals in Boston and as part of Harvard University’s internal leadership development programs. As a facilitator, Gillien has mediated contract negotiations for school districts and symphony orchestras; facilitated strategic relationship management among alliance partners; and led a multi-year multi-stakeholder collaboration in the public sector.
Gillien’s practice is guided by theories of interest-based negotiation and communication developed by the Harvard Negotiation Project and Triad Consulting, authors of Difficult Conversations and Thanks for the Feedback; by her work on dialogue and structural dynamics in teams with Dialogix UK and David Kantor, author of Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders; and by her work with Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers.
Gillien received her B.A. from Yale University, her M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
