Manuel has been developing a competencies-based model of Evolutionary Leadership since the early 1990-s. In 2014 he co-founded the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership and, a year later, the Evolutionary Leadership Community to further develop the model and offer Evolutionary Leadership as a resource for change-makers across domains, roles, and geographic locations.

Manuel holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Humanistic Psychology from the University of Massachusetts and a Master of Education in Social Psychology from Boston University. He studied with Bucky Fuller, Humberto Maturana, Fernando Flores, Ronald Heifetz, Peter Senge, and other evolutionary thinkers. He is a founding member of The Society for Organizational Learning and a former adjunct faculty in the Leadership for Change program at Boston College.