Speaker · Author · Mediator
I speak to executive audiences worldwide on the specific skill that reopens the leadership room. What starts on stage often continues as internal training or a small-group roundtable for founders and CEOs.
Keynotes · Team Training · Executive Roundtables · Private Coaching · Mediation
25 years resolving conflict
1,500 MEDIATIONS
3,000 INMATES TRAINED
5 PUBLISHED BOOKS
Speaker Reel
The Problem
What would your leadership team be capable of if the real conversation didn't wait until after the meeting?
Somewhere along the way, your meetings got quiet. Not silent. Polite. Agreeable. Slightly airless. Your best people started raising the hard concerns in the hallway instead of the room. Your senior hires started leaving for reasons your exit interviews never captured. Your decisions took two meetings to close instead of one, and the second meeting was where the real conversation happened.
How much are you already paying for the resignations you didn't see coming?
None of this is a communication problem. It is a nervous system problem. Every executive who has ever been sharpened in front of their peers has learned to bring you the version of the truth they can defend rather than the version you need to see. That behavior is trainable. So is the reversal.
How important is it to you that your leadership team brings you the truth in the room, not in a resignation email?
The Solution
The move that changes what happens in your leadership room is smaller than most people assume. It is a two-second sentence a leader learns to say when someone raises a concern, before responding to the content of the concern.
The neuroscience is well established. Naming an emotion in another person accurately reduces the threat response in their brain within seconds. The person in front of you can think again. So can you.
What would you pay for a leadership team that stops circling and starts closing?
I have taught this move to Fortune 500 executives. I have taught it to maximum-security inmates who used it to defuse gang violence inside prisons. It works the same way in a boardroom as it does in a cell block, because the human nervous system does not know the difference.
If your executives were bringing you the numbers with the rough edges still attached, how different would your last quarter have looked?
What I Do
Keynotes · Executive Roundtables · Team Training · Private Coaching · Mediation
01
Ninety minutes on your stage. I show your leadership audience the specific move that changes what happens in their meetings on Monday morning. I work with volunteers from the room live. Nobody leaves with a slide deck. Everybody leaves with one practical skill they can use in the next room they walk into. Often the starting point for deeper work.
02
A ten-week engagement for a single leadership team, up to fifteen people. Two to three hours to open, then one hour per week for ten weeks. Your team practices the method under progressively higher stakes until the skill is available in the room, not just on paper. Delivered in-person or virtual.
03
A small cross-company cohort of founders and CEOs, six to ten seats per group. We meet weekly for an hour over eight weeks. Each session works on the actual leadership problem a participant is carrying into the week. Every participant walks out with a peer group that has watched them work.
Doug also offers private 1:1 executive coaching and mediation on request. Reach out to discuss.
A ninety-minute keynote is often the entry point. Audiences walk out with one specific skill they can use in the meeting they are walking into next. Some organizations then bring me back for internal training or invite their leadership team into a private roundtable.
TEDx Talk
How to Listen Someone Into Existence, TEDxApex
“Excellent. Thank you for another great program! Thank you! Thank you! You were wonderful and inspiring. Very powerful, well-taught program. Courageous presentation.”
Adopted by Fortune 500 Companies and 10,000+ Graduates Worldwide
“Doug Noll is a dynamic plenary speaker and an outstanding workshop presenter. He combines his knowledge, experience and wit to engage the audience and receive their full attention and participation in his presentation.”
“I started working with Doug a few months ago in order to develop skills that would help de-escalate tension while sheltering-in-place with family. The techniques he teaches were very useful to that end. I have found myself incorporating them in many other situations as well, such as with patients and staff in the office, in dialogue with friends, and with my toddler son. Some of his techniques are simple enough that I was able to use them immediately, with profound effect. Additionally, his approach is helping me to conserve mental and emotional energy while navigating challenging interpersonal dynamics, which has been invaluable for this working mom. I highly recommend his training.”
“'Ignore the words, listen only for the emotions'. Why have I not realized this before, in all my 56 years!? You truly are having a positive impact and making ripples, literally, around the world. Add to that the framework for stacking the affect layers and their order of presentation. Wow!”
About Doug
I spent twenty-two years as an AV-rated commercial trial lawyer before deciding I had built the wrong career. I left the practice and spent the next decade studying how humans actually resolve conflict, formally at Fresno Pacific University's peacemaking program and informally in every hard room I could get into.
In 2010 I co-founded Prison of Peace, a program that trains life-sentence and maximum-security inmates in the same de-escalation method I teach executives. Three thousand inmates trained to date, in prisons across the United States and internationally. The program earned me California Attorney of the Year in 2012.
I am the author of five books, most recently "Empathy Leadership: The Powerful Skill That Drives Winning Results." I hold the Sid Lezak Award of Excellence from the International Academy of Mediators and Neutral of the Year from the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals. If you have watched me speak or heard me on a podcast, this is what I do the rest of the time.
Start the conversation
Book a call. We talk for twenty minutes about what is happening in your leadership team and whether what I do is a fit. If it is, we discuss the format that matches your situation. If it is not, I point you to someone better suited.
