Alison Wood Brooks is the O'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches a cutting-edge course in the MBA elective curriculum called "How to talk gooder in business and life," an experiential course designed to help students hone four core conversational skills through practice (TALK): Topic selection, Asking questions, Levity, and Kindness. She has also taught FIELD Foundations in the MBA required curriculum (RC), Negotiation in the MBA elective curriculum (EC), Micro Topics in Organizational Behavior in the PhD curriculum, and is affiliated with the Behavioral Insights Group at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.
In her research, Professor Brooks studies the psychology of conversation--why we say things we shouldn't and don't say things we should--and how emotions how we think and interact with others, particularly in the workplace. Her research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Psychological Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Economic Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American.
Professor Brooks holds a Ph.D. in Decision Processes from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in Psychology and Finance from Princeton University.
In two episodes (“The Data Coach” and “The Unfair Coach”) of his podcast series “Against the Rules,” Michael Lewis explores coaching through the lens of Prof. Brooks’ MBA course, “How to talk gooder in business and life.”
Conversation is a profound part of the human experience. To share our ideas, thoughts, and feelings with each other, we converse face to face and remotely—via phone, email, text message, online comment boards, and in contracts. Conversations form the bedrock of our relationships and, often, function as the vehicle of productivity at work.
Unfortunately, most people make conversational mistakes. This is especially true in the workplace, where norms and rules of appropriateness and professionalism matter, and issues surrounding voice and backlash abound. We say things we shouldn’t (errors of commission) and don’t say things we should (errors of omission).
Previous research on conversation has been limited because natural conversations are difficult to capture and analyze. Professor Brooks uses a combination of traditional and cutting-edge methods such as machine learning, natural language processing, field experiments, and laboratory experiments to identify and improve pervasive and intriguiging conversational phenomena. For example, Professor Brooks has identified tactics people should use more often than they do: seeking advice, issuing apologies, revealing personal failures, carefully labeling emotions, and asking questions (especially follow-up questions). On the other hand, she has identified some tactics people use often but shouldn't, such as making inappropriate jokes in the workplace and giving backhanded compliments.
Once considered irrational, emotions often exert a more profound influence on decision-making and workplace outcomes than logic or reason. Professor Brooks studies emotional experience, emotional expression, and how individuals can regulate their emotions effectively. Much of her research in this domain has focused on anxiety, one of the most pervasive emotions people experience in the workplace (and outside of work). Unlike research in clinical psychology, which has focused on treatments and medications that might help individuals with disordered or abnormal anxiety, her research focuses on the type of anxious feelings most people experience every day—the anxiety we feel before leading a meeting, giving a public speech, or completing difficult tasks. She has identified important behavioral consequences of feeling anxious: it limits our ability to take others’ perspectives, causes us to seek out and rely heavily on advice (even when the advice is obviously bad), and causes individuals to reply quickly, make steep concessions, exit prematurely, and earn less profit in negotiations.
Fortunately, anxiety can be managed. Professor Brooks has identified several novel methods for mitigating the deleterious effects of anxiety. For example, most people think they should calm down when they feel anxious. Instead, staying in a high-arousal state and reframing anxiety as excitement is much more effective for performing well on high-pressure performance tasks. Next, she finds that pre-performance rituals—once believed to be highly irrational—can actually reduce performance anxiety and improve subsequent performance. Finally, she finds that after an expression of distress (e.g., crying at work), people have tremendous control over how people perceive them. For example, saying “I’m passionate about this” rather than “I’m emotional about this” increases others’ perceptions of one’s competence and self-control. This work contributes to the emerging field of interpersonal emotion regulation—how we can exert control over others’ emotions and their perceptions of our emotions.
Professor Brooks's interest in anxiety has expanded to include other emotions as well. For example, she has used large datasets from Facebook to show that higher amounts and higher diversity of emotional expression online increase happiness and life satisfaction at both the individual and national levels. Then, by studying time capsules, she finds that there is a unique, unanticipated joy associated with rediscovering mundane details from your past. And, finally, she finds that revealing personal failures (in addition to successes) reduces malicious envy felt by observers and increases benign envy, inspiring others to work hard to achieve the same success.This is an Elective Curriculum course for HBS MBA students. People must converse effectively to achieve success in every aspect of business and life – from pitching ideas to giving feedback, brainstorming and making strategic decisions, from interviewing to firing. Though the case method hones students’ ability to present their ideas in large groups, this course will focus on helping students sharpen their ability to interact with others in the wide array of everyday conversations. First, we develop a framework to understand conversation as a fundamental part of the human experience – a complex, repeated game we play with others daily. Then, through many immersive exercises (enacted with students in the course and with others outside of HBS), students learn evidence-based tactics to converse more effectively (talk “gooder”) in their lives and careers—with time to practice these tactics during the course and beyond.
FIELD Foundations is a course for first-year MBA students in the Required Curriculum. As a complement to case method courses that students take in the first year of the MBA program, FIELD Foundations offers hands-on leadership practice and immersive team experiences. Students are divided into small teams to complete interactive workshops. These team simulations, feedback, and self-reflection exercises help them develop self-awareness and answer key questions like: How can you engage in difficult conversations? How self-aware are you about your own biases? How can you make diverse teams better? Can you be more emotionally intelligent? What kind of leader do you want to be?
Taught alongside the case method, FIELD Foundations provides students with a more comprehensive cycle of learning by thinking, doing, and reflecting, and prepares them to take the FIELD Global Immersion course in the spring semester, when they will put their leadership ideas into practice in the real world.
Micro Topics in Organizational Behavior is a PhD seminar course exploring current and seminal research on individual, dyadic, small group, and intra-organizational behavior. Examples of topics at the individual level include emotions, cognition, and behavioral decision making. Examples at the dyadic level include social perception and bias. Group-level topics include teams and multiparty decision making. Topics at the intra-organizational level include culture and gender.
The course readings are not exhaustive of the OB field—there are many other interesting micro topics—but they cover a wide range of emerging and foundational topics. Most class sessions will feature a discussion with a faculty member about his/her research topics and process (including a discussion of the review and publication process).
Negotiation is an Elective Curriculum course for HBS MBA students. Success at work and at home requires the ability to negotiate. Whether you are forging an agreement with your suppliers, trying to ink a deal with potential customers, raising money from investors, managing a conflict inside your firm, resolving a dispute that is headed towards litigation, or interacting with friends, family members, or colleagues, your ability to negotiate will determine how well you perform.
Because others do not have the same interests, perspectives, and values as you, the ability to negotiate is critical both professionally and personally. This course will help you to become a more effective negotiator.