Michael Chaffers

Michael Chaffers is a Lecturer on Law, teaching the Spring Negotiation Workshop. Michael is also a Director of Talent & Organization Development at Novartis, where he specializes in helping organizations and teams think and act more strategically, effectively manage difficult and complex organizational conflicts, work collaboratively with others, and pursue significant organizational changes.

Prior to joining Novartis, Michael worked an organizational consultant, facilitator and executive coach for organizations and individuals in a variety of industries, including Financial Services, High Tech and Life Sciences. He has also has facilitated complex multiparty community disputes for the City of Cambridge and in Minneapolis-St. Paul involving issues of race and social justice, jointly trained school board and teacher union negotiators in interest-based negotiation and mediated their contract negotiations, trained mediators for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, and facilitated strategic planning sessions for numerous non-profit boards. Michael has also lectured at UMASS-Boston on conflict resolution in organizations.

In all his work, and in the multi-disciplinary ethos of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, Michael is passionate about applying tools and concepts from multiple fields to develop imaginative solutions to problems that include strategic or operational issues and challenging human dynamics.

Michael received his B.A. from Stanford University, and his J.D. from the Harvard Law School.