Doug Manuel: Energising Teams and Inspiring Connection & Collaboration

Doug doesn’t just talk about performing as one. He creates it live, in real time. A room walks in as individuals. It walks out as one. He has now done it more than a thousand times, for over 500 organizations on five continents, in rooms of ten people and rooms of three thousand, and across those events his sessions have held a Net Promoter Score above ninety percent. Harvard Business School books him, as do the World Economic Forum, Google, McKinsey, PwC, LVMH, Oracle, Shell, Nestlé and BMW. Oprah Winfrey chose him to open her third Super Soul Sessions, and he has performed at TED Global.

From a BBC career to a village in Senegal

He knows the problem from the inside, because he was it. He was six when he watched his father have a heart attack. His father survived, but his parents were separating, and he was shuttled between two homes until he was eight, when he was sent away to boarding school, surrounded by other boys at every hour and lonelier than he had ever been. It cost him years. He became a BBC filmmaker with a career other people envied, and still nobody in his life really knew him. One drumming workshop in Oxford in 1996 began to undo it, and within a year he had left television for West Africa, where village life gave him what no career had: people who knew him. He is not offering a cure he read about. He is offering the one that worked on him.

The From Me to We™ Method

Doug pioneered the Method in corporate work in 2000 and has refined it every year since. It runs in three steps. Awareness of self settles the nervous system through breath and an ancient acupressure-based tapping sequence. Awareness of others is the part that matters most to leaders, because empathy stops being a value on a wall and becomes something two colleagues have just done. Collective synergy closes it, with body percussion and voice layered one part at a time until the whole room is holding a piece of music that none of them could hold alone. He has taught it at IMD every year since 2002, and at CEIBS in China, HEC Paris and INSEAD, and it is endorsed in IMD’s book Mastering Executive Education.

What your audience will take away

A clear view of what disconnection is costing in engagement, retention and discretionary effort. A way to settle a room before it has to decide anything. Empathy moved off the values wall and into something two colleagues have just done. Trust built the only way it is built, by knowing someone. And a simple daily practice that survives the flight home and still works on Monday. Nobody is asked to perform, nobody is put on the spot, and nobody is left out, which is the entire point of a session about belonging.

Lighting Up Lives

Doug founded the not-for-profit Lighting Up Lives, which works with rural villages across West Africa, and keeps a home in Abéné in Senegal. The villages he returns to every year have almost none of what a Western organisation would call an advantage, and not one of them has a loneliness problem. He is also producing a documentary about the cure to the loneliness epidemic, filmed in Senegal and Guinea, with a nationwide US impact campaign in planning.

Book Doug Manuel for Your Next Event

Visit our contact page to learn more about his unique approach to motivation and empowerment and how his services can be tailored to meet your needs.