Doug Manuel: Human Connection Expert
Human connection keynote speaker and former BBC filmmaker Doug Manuel helps organizations rebuild trust, deepen collaboration, and perform as one team.
Quick Facts:
- Creator of the From Me To We™ Method
- Over 1,000 events for more than 500 organizations worldwide
- Twenty years teaching at Harvard Business School, IMD and CEIBS
- TEDx Hollywood speaker who opened Oprah Winfrey's third Super Soul Sessions
- Formats:
Keynote Speaker | Experiential Facilitator | Human Connection Expert
- Audiences:
Corporate leaders, executives, intact teams, sales organizations, business schools, industry associations, conference audiences, and organizations rebuilding culture after disruption.
- Outcomes:
- Rebuild trust and belonging across fragmented teams
- Turn collaboration from a stated value into a practice
- Leave with shared language and habits that last
- Travels from: Miami, FL
- **Fee range: $20,001 - $35,000
Keynote Topics
FROM ME TO WE™ - THE KEYNOTE
How a room of individuals becomes one high-performing team.
Every leader wants a team that performs as one. Most settle for a group of talented people who happen to share a room. What holds them short of it is disconnection, which surfaces as disengagement, slow decisions and attrition long before anyone names the cause.
Doug does not describe that shift. He creates it, live, in front of the audience, and the room itself becomes the demonstration.
In this keynote, Doug will show your audience:
- Why disconnection is a performance problem rather than a wellbeing one
- The three steps of the From Me To We™ Method, worked through in the room
- A simple sequence they can use with their own team on Monday
FROM ME TO WE™ - THE DRUMS
Collaboration a team can feel in their hands.
You can tell a team to collaborate. You cannot tell them what it feels like. Silos, hybrid working and back-to-back calls have left colleagues who have never once been in rhythm with each other in any literal sense.
Every participant gets a djembe, and no musical ability is required or assumed. Doug leads the room from its first tentative note to a single unmistakable groove, and the journey there is the lesson.
In this session, your people will:
- Listen before playing, and hold their own part while others hold theirs
- Feel the moment a group locks together, and know what caused it
- Leave with a shared reference point the team keeps using afterwards
FROM ME TO WE™ - THE WORKSHOP
Turning the insight into how the team actually works.
A keynote moves a room. A workshop changes how it works on Monday. This is the half day for leadership teams and intact groups who have to live with each other after the event.
Smaller numbers, more time, and the three steps taken apart properly rather than demonstrated. Between each one the group translates what just happened into its own language: the meeting that goes badly, the handover that keeps failing.
In this half day, the group will:
- Name what each person brings, and what they habitually withhold
- Agree a small set of operating habits of their own making
- Practise them in the room rather than taking them away as theory
Talent Short Bio
Doug Manuel doesn’t just talk about performing as one, he creates it live, in real time. A human connection keynote speaker, experiential facilitator and former BBC filmmaker, he is the creator of the From Me To We™ Method, and he helps organizations rebuild trust, deepen collaboration, and perform as one team.
He knows the problem from the inside. Sent away to boarding school at eight, he later built a BBC career other people envied with nobody in it who really knew him. One drumming workshop in Oxford in 1996 changed his direction, and within a year he had left television for West Africa.
Thirty years on he has delivered more than a thousand events for over 500 organizations on five continents, among them Harvard Business School, the World Economic Forum, Google, McKinsey, PwC and LVMH. He has taught at IMD every year since 2002, founded the Lighting Up Lives NGO, and works in English and French from Miami.
Videos
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Fee Range Information
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