A man of many credentials
Meet Safety on Edge Global Forum (SOTE-25) speaker and co-founder Malcolm Staves, whose list of credentials includes Global Vice President of Health & Safety at L’Oréal, TEDx speaker, Co-founder OneWISH, RoSPA Guardian Angel Award 2018 and Corporate Influencer of the Year 2021. And, when he is relaxing at home with his wife and three boys, a science fiction nerd and the dream of being Captain of a Starship.
Childhood dreamer
Every dream has a beginning, and for Malcolm Staves, it was a childhood aspiration to captain a starship. His fascination with space exploration, ignited by the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle landing in 1969, fueled his academic journey. This dream led him to excel in his studies, earning a BSc degree in Chemical Engineering at Loughborough University and a Master of Science (MSc) in Integrated Environmental Management, Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources at Bath University.
Overseeing the health and safety of 88,000 employees.
As the Global Vice President of Health & Safety at L’Oréal, Malcolm oversees the safety of approximately 88,000 employees. His role extends to all aspects of the company’s operations, from manufacturing and distribution to research and administrative sites and retail stores.
“L’Oreal deals with many raw materials including flammables and oxidizing agents; in essence, despite the grace and beauty of our final product, we are a multinational manufacturing, research, distribution and sales organization with complex safety challenges covering work equipment, use of chemicals to travelling on company business. Our job is to ensure that every single employee, visitor and contractor goes home from working at L’Oréal in the same condition they arrived that day – and why not with even a little more knowledge about domestic and leisure health and safety so that wherever they are, no matter what they are doing, we help them stay safe.”
Visible Felt Leadership
Speaking at SOTE-25, Malcolm will address creating a future in safety through visible, felt leadership. He calls this VUCA, an acronym first used in the US Armed Forces in the 1980s—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. “I prefer to see the world more positively, and if you flip the acronym, it stands for—Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility. These four words will help us adapt to the health and safety needs and expectations of our organizations in an ever-changing world. In fact, it will help us become “future fit”,” say Staves.
At L’Oreal, Staves has created a leadership culture of Visible Felt Leadership. “If you are not visible as a leader, you will have minimum impact. An organization’s employees must genuinely feel that leadership is sincere and authentic. You do this by building trust, connecting, collaborating and engaging with all levels of staff and management. We are successful when our global workforce takes the L’Oreal safety values and principles into their homes. We believe in work and home safety and strive to contribute to local communities and families by educating people on how to avoid unnecessary life-changing injuries or deaths at work and in their daily lives.”
The benefits of attending SOTE-25
“SOTE-25 offers a networking opportunity of immense proportions. It provides an open space to share what’s working well and delivering results, new paradigms and their potential (or not!) with peers and thought leaders. It’s also a great opportunity to get better discussions between research, academia and industry,” says Staves.
Malcolm notes that the content at SOTE-25 “will be outstanding, as it is a never-before gathering of the industry’s top brains and leaders.”
He adds, “The goal is to align research with the needs of the industry. By bringing the professional and academic spheres together, research can be practically tested, provide proof of concept and add credibility to the academic abstract.”
Malcolm Staves will be speaking at SOTE-25’s Stream One on Leadership and Culture. He is an advocate of the hummingbird theory approach to developing culture change—#bethehummingbird
Watch his TEDX talk, Be the Hummingbird.
Listen to his Safeopedia podcast.