In this episode of The SAFE Leader Podcast, Mark McBride-Wright sits down with Malcolm Staves, Global Vice President of Health and Safety at L’Oréal, to explore what it means to lead with purpose, care, and conviction. Malcolm shares the story of the hummingbird, a simple but powerful metaphor that has come to define his approach to leadership and culture change. From global safety systems to grassroots impact in schools and communities, Malcolm shows how small actions, taken consistently, can drive transformational change.
The conversation moves beyond corporate health and safety into the emotional core of leadership. Malcolm opens up about mental wellness, prevention over reaction, and the need to break the silence around topics like suicide and stress. With reflections on engineering, empathy, and evolving leadership styles, this episode will leave you inspired to become a hummingbird in your own world, doing what you can, where you are, with what you have.
Read the Transcript
Malcolm Staves 0:01
It starts recording. There we go.
Mark McBride-Wright 0:06
Hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted today to be joined by Malcolm Steves, who is the global vice president of health and safety at L’Oreal. So Malcolm is a globally recognized environmental health and safety professional with a career spanning over 16 years at L’Oreal, where he serves as global vice president of health and safety, passionate about embedding sustainable high performance cultural change. Malcolm is an advocate of the hummingbird theory, which emphasizes the power of small, impactful actions to drive meaningful transformation. In addition to his role at L’Oreal Malcolm, has contributed to advancing occupational health and safety as an occupational health and safety strategic partner with the capitals coalition and as Vice Chairman of the advisory board for the Center for safety and health sustainability. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Bureau Veritas and Alcan packaging, further solidifying his experience in health, safety and sustainability, a recipient of prestigious accolades such as the Ross guardian angel award in 2018 and the corporate health and safety influencer award in 2022 Malcolm’s vision extends beyond organizational boundaries, promoting global collaboration to save lives. Malcolm, Well,
Malcolm Staves 1:35
hi, thank you. Was a pleasure to be here.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:38
I am so happy to have been able to get a little slice of your time. You’re a very busy man.
Malcolm Staves 1:44
I seem to be all over the place, but you know, it’s my passion, and I love what I do. Are
Mark McBride-Wright 1:48
you going to send me some, like, complimentary hair samples or something from L’Oreal?
Malcolm Staves 1:54
Not a problem, not a problem at all. But I’ll need to check your color and what type you want. But anyway, no problem. No problem. I thought you might, I thought you might, know, probably should ask for Prada or Valentina, or if someone wrong that I can get you more easily, right?
Mark McBride-Wright 2:10
Okay, I’ll go for the more premium end stuff. We, so we met, um, working backwards. We, I can’t remember how I found out about the global people sustainability summit, but I, oh, I came and gave a talk on a panel, I think, in the London one. And that was when we think that was the when we first crossed paths. And it was, it was very rarely have I seen a chemical engineer, a fellow chemical engineer in the Occupational Health and Safety space. You know, usually when I see other chemical engineers, it’s in the process safety, technical side of things. So I was really excited to see the fi Kim e after your name, and then the fact that I only found out after the global people sustainability event about your hummingbird talk and what I think I watched it on the end of day one, because one of the one of the delegates was wearing one of the brooches that you Yes, the listeners are probably now wondering, What on earth is Mark talking about? So can you just, can you, can you talk us through about the hummingbird theory and all that, and why you give out brooches and what the talks about?
Malcolm Staves 3:38
It is quite a nice story, actually, because many, many years ago, within L’Oreal, I was looking to visualize brand almost what we do in health and safety and and the reason behind it, without having lots of words about objectives and visions or whatever, which obviously we have. And I came across through somebody else that I was working with this hummingbird story, which was primarily comes from Latin America, children’s story from, like, the Inca era kind of thing, many, many years ago. But an environmental person had actually taken it on board as a way of saying to everybody, you know, no matter what’s going on, no matter how small we are, we all can make a contribution. And she went on set and protect the planet, but and the visualization behind the story is, is a forest fire, right? And all the animals rush out. It’s a children’s story, and all the big animals, all the rest of it, but obviously there’s some animals left behind because there may be ill or whatever. And this little hummingbird, this really little hummingbird, flies out, goes to the river, picks up a bit of water, and goes backwards and forwards and tries to put the fire out. And eventually, the little animal said, Well, you know, you’re absolutely crazy. You know, what are you trying to do? You’re having no impact or whatever. And the little hummingbird. They’ll stop and sort of says, well, at least I’m doing the best I can, and every little bit counts, right? Yeah. And then one by one, I like to see the story going forward, which is not actually in the film, to say that one by one, the other animals all come together because, because the Humber showing a showing leadership, leadership of care, trying to make a difference. And one by one, they all come to help, and they put out the fire, thus saving their friends, saving the environment, etc. And even though I’ve mixed things a bit because it was an environmental story, but I saw the impact of a massive fire right on people’s lives, on health, etc, the damage to the pollution of pollution to the river, etc, impacts the fish, etc. So I saw a bigger story. You could say, yeah. So I just internalized it. Everybody laughed at me to start off with, right? I mean, this was 2010 2011 I put it as a in our policy, like in the background of what, you know, like, like a watermark, etc. But bit by bit, it grew, you know, it stuck with people. It got momentum. And now it’s wherever you go in L’Oreal, you’ll see the hummingbird somewhere associated with health and safety communications, and now environmental health and safety. So it’s gone back to the environmental people, and for example, of our warehousing, and I’m so I love this, our warehouse in Mexico as a, I would say, a four meter by four meter hummingbird on the wall. Does it? Right? You go to a site in Mexico where there are hummingbirds, they’ve created a hummingbird garden, right? Wow. In India, we, you know, we have a program called keeping it safe, right? Yeah, whereby we go into townships, slums and take education. But we actually have a school that we fund, and we funded it for a long time as a company, and I told all the kids the hummingbird story, and they wanted it to be a horror story. I mean, these are little kids in slums in India, horror story. Anyhow, the bottom result is, when they walk into school in the morning, they now have big hummingbird painted on the wall to remind them that they can make a difference. Oh, wow. And then, just to finish as well, and I’ve taken up a bit of time, is that, but the next step is that if, if you and I do a little bit every day for environment, health and safety, or just kindness, right? Yeah, then that’s not bad. But then if other people do it, and 1000 people, 5000 10,000 etc, together, we can make a big difference. So it’s it’s also a nice way to talk about the story of marginal gains. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And it’s just become a way of life. It’s just grown and grown and grown and I, and I give to people that have make it make a difference, people that I know, for my my female friends, they get a badge with a hummingbird badge and whatever. And my male friends will typically get some cufflinks with hummingbirds on that. Oh,
Speaker 1 8:10
nice, nice, nice. Thank you. Nice. Love that I love that you’ve
Mark McBride-Wright 8:16
got me You’ve got me. Thinking, is there some analogy in my safe leader thing that I’m sort of coming to market now with my book and my training course. Maybe there’s, maybe we’ve just finished a delivery of a pilot with rolls. Royce, SMR, so we’ve got 12 amazing, amazing, amazing leaders. Some are already established leaders. Some are it’s their first leadership role, and they’re about to, you know, grow a team, essentially. And so they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re figuring that out. We, we’ve gone through this journey of so safe stands for share, act, feel and empower, this circle that people go around where you have to first understand your own difference, what’s your own story, to contribute to the world. And so we create space for individuals to self explore that, and that’s something that we don’t often do as engineers and as men, to be honest, totally and so we get, we give space for that. We bring in some public training, public speaking training as well, to do your anchor story. So it gives it there’s a sort of by product benefit that we’re actually creating better communicators in the learners themselves, and then we take them through this idea of acting or feeling, and then being a source of empowerment for for others,
Malcolm Staves 9:28
my training, they’re hummingbirds. They’re hummingbird mother,
Mark McBride-Wright 9:31
that’s what I mean. There’s similarities like total collective and by getting each of them to be like a lighthouse, you know, if we had so, I guess the light a lighthouse is almost like an analogy to your hummingbird. If you’ve got lots of hummingbirds going to get what are the volumes larger? If you’ve got more lighthouses being turned on with people sharing their stories about things that we can’t see from looking at them, then we’ve got more moments of connection where we’ll have empathy and we can find out about how that. And I see this in male populations, like men are conditioned to hold up the guard, not be vulnerable, be natural, etc, so prevalent in engineering. And you know, we’ve got some of the highest suicide rates in the sector as well. So wow, yeah. Though, this is why, whenever I deliver to, you know, an engineering business, it’s, it’s like, oh, right, okay, we get it, you know. And they’ve tried X, Y and Z to engage the workforce on Ed and I we’re seeing that play out, that narrative play out politically now, where people have felt alienated, disenfranchised, told that they’re the cause of the problem. And so it’s very shallow, the impact that’s then returned. So my aha moment was when I started doing equal engineers. And I discovered these statistics from the Office of National Statistics in the UK. And I was like, Well, that can’t be right. You know, we would never tolerate such a high rate of loss of life from a safety perspective, physical safety perspective, we would design it out. We would eradicate it. We would reduce it to as low as reasonably practicable and then manage residual risk and blah, blah, blah engineer. Yeah, exactly. I know. I know it’s in my DNA. So, so this intersectional perspective of safety engineer, but also a fledgling dei practitioner, I was like, there must be a hook in here, a way we can get more men to engage with dei when we lead with these statistics. So that was why we did our masculinity and engineering research at Eco engineers, because I didn’t believe the data. So we’ve done two rounds of research. We got nearly 800 respondents in each round, yeah, once in 2018 and once in 2021, and in both surveys, one in five reported losing a work colleague to suicide, and one in five reported suicidal ideation or self harm. Personally, that number went up to one in four in the 2021 data, we’ve got the survey open again now. It’s going to be a longitudinal study that we do every three years, but this that this is my journey to the safe leader, because I was like the way we’re doing dei just isn’t working. It can live within safety, and we need to leverage the familiarity the engineers have with physical safety, extend that to psychological safety. And then, to your point, by getting more people becoming lighthouses or hummingbirds, will start to dismantle this hostility that we face, you know,
Malcolm Staves 12:24
people, but also you’re right, it’s also some of the taboos as well, isn’t it? Yeah, so sometimes you’ve just got to put the word out, because when you put out the word suicide, right, the first reaction is, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to go there for a lot of people, right? Yeah. But like with, again, the hummingbird or the lighthouse, the more we talk about it, and the more we put it out there, then the more it will become accepted, maybe not for in the next six months or one year or whatever, but as you put it out. And one of the most remarkable people that talks about suicide by her experience, almost experience, because she often says that she actually shouldn’t be here today, kind of thing. And I know she wouldn’t mind me saying that is, is Rosie Russell, and Rosie as one of the most I’m going to say how. I don’t know if the word is heartfelt, but it really rams it home, the importance of it. She talks about, I think it’s got something like the 7c of suicide, the different levels that people go before it’s okay, it’s too late. And You’ve almost got to be able and this is where the hummingbird comes in again. Sometimes you’ve got to be able to see the low level signals, the changes in somebody. And you’ve got to be brave enough to actually go and try and have a conversation. Yes, and that all it needs, right? Sometimes it all it needs. I mean, you can’t. We’re not psychiatrists, we’re engineers, we’re chemical engineers. We’re not We’re not psychologists either, but we can see changes in people, yes, yes, you know.
Mark McBride-Wright 13:57
And you know that this is why I think safety has just got the framework already to allow this to be retooled that we can move through the all the headwinds that are in front of us with this new administration in the US and stuff. Because to your point, it’s all about, you know that I always draw bringing engineering idioms when we’re doing our training and it the engineers like it. You know, they might not be engineers, but they work in an engineer an organization, and they work with engineers so they get and the, you know, the linkage to safety is so helpful because, you know, people never question whether or not you should intervene if someone’s physical safety is at risk, and then if you are able to intervene, the need to then get medical attention. Like there is a, there is a bounded expectation on your ability to intervene being a non medical professional. But it’s, it’s the same, in my view, it’s the same with implementing Mental Health First Aid training. You know. And under so you’re then being trained in the frameworks and all that to be able to intervene when someone is showing signs. You’re receptive to these low level seeds, as you call them, off the early indicators, and then you’re more likely to intervene earlier to avoid what is an escalation to a top event, which is someone taking their own life, or even
Malcolm Staves 15:23
because of now we’re talking about mental health, which is also a subject that’s important to me. And in fact, I’m helping driving that program within L’Oreal due, okay, developing the framework and the guidelines, which between you and I, is not easy when you’re talking about global, yeah. I can imagine specific, yeah. But one of the things that I want to do, and this is where the engineering bit comes in, right? You know, we’re taught when we do things about prevention, stop it from happening in the first place. When you look at most of the mental health programs, they look at it after it’s a little bit too late to talk about the suicide, the depression and whatever. So but as an engineer, believe it or not, and what we’re going to do, what we’re putting in place at the moment, at the moment, is okay. How do we detect the low level signals? How do we help people on the prevention side, so that they don’t get in that situation? Some people talk about resilience, and sometimes I’m not too sure whether that’s the right word. But how do you absorb? How do you increase your capacity to to absorb stress? Or how do you change so that instead of being the macho engineer, you actually are prepared to open up and talk to other people? Yeah, right, and it’s so complex as well, and but the idea being in the way I look at the way we’re going to do it is okay. You need it when it when it starts to get serious, and that is not the manager or anybody else, right? That’s the professionals. Yeah, the manager has a role to play, and of creating the right work environment that somebody psychological safety is the buzzword, but it means that somebody who’s not feeling quite right could come and talk to me about it, and it could be a we don’t mental health is, I’m going to say, is a word that I struggle with sometimes, because it’s seen very negatively in many societies. So I think mental wellness is a mental well being is a much better, acceptable term for a lot of because for a lot of, a lot of people, and I think you can help people improve their mental wellness, right, by making them aware. And sometimes you can talk to a million people, and maybe only one person actually does takes on board what you what you’ve mentioned, and they do something about it, but that’s one life. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 17:43
I can tell you, from having done delivery and framed the conversation in this way to multiple organizations. Now the that in every instance, there’s always been a experience locally within that organization where this is real. So the number that to me, that experience of seeing the data from our research and from the ONS, but then the experience then delivering it in front of clients, and then see it become relatable, of someone in that on that site, for example, meet this was where I was really like, there is something in this, you know. And you’re right. Mental mental health can be a triggering word. You know, we all have mental health. It can be positive or negative or neutral, just like we all have physical health. It can be good, positive or neutral. It’s, it’s about finding the right, the right language. I love that it
Malcolm Staves 18:36
can change daily as well. It can, you know, you can be under a lot of stress at the moment, at the moment, and you’re really, really struggling. But because of again, I’m gonna use the word resilience. It’s not the right word. I struggle to find the right word. But you, it doesn’t tip you over the top, right? You, it’s elastic, right? And it brings you back. But if you stretch that elastic too much and too often it doesn’t go back to its original form. Yeah, and good analogy. I think it’s sort of important, and I also think slightly different, but it’s going to come back to it. So we launched a women in safety program as part of our big D, D, E, and I program within L’Oreal, and I have a lady in my team that’s completely passionate about it, and now she created a network of about 160 160 60 ladies. But what I also notice is that, you know, when you have more women in your team. People talk more testosterone battles for want of expression. You know about macho themes in meetings, and when you can reduce the tension even within the meetings, the discussions are done a little bit more on compromise, understanding and all the rest of it because of balance. Yes, yeah. And. Yeah. And I think that’s also a good way to create a cycle by having better balance. And this is gender I’m gonna say any gender balance, if I can, is, is it gives you the diversity which allows people to open up and to talk,
Mark McBride-Wright 20:18
yeah, right. And we’ve been lacking in that, due to a lack of balance in gender equality and engineering, you know.
Malcolm Staves 20:27
But you know, when you and I went to university, I mean, and did chemical engineering, I think I had was 60 of us, and two were women. The problem, the challenge being, is that with when they come through and take senior positions, yes, well, you know, the pool is still not balanced. There’s not even now enough chemical engineers that are women coming through university as an example kind of thing. You know, yeah, and, but it’s, it’s a fascinating subject. I could go on for it. But I think that this old whole thing about mental health is it’s also creating the right kind of work environment that people think they can trust you as a leader. Yeah, come and talk to them about the problems, and you’re not going to judge them, right? Yeah, you’re going to be there to listen. Or you can be the old fashioned macho and top down and, oh, you’ve got to, you’ve got to be a man kind of approach, and don’t cry and don’t Yeah, but what it needs is people like, I’m going to say like us and other people as well, to actually be role models to talk about this kind of subject. And bit by bit, the hummingbirds, my theory will be that bit by bit, other people will open up because you have done, and because I have done, and because other people have done. And the final thing to remember is we criticize very often where we are in the world or in respect to things like this, right? And if you take the UK as an example, because we both originally in the UK, 50 years ago, we were putting people that were getting stressed out, irritable, nervous and whatever. We were putting them in a bath of water, putting electrodes in their mouths and passing electricity through them. In the UK, it was when you went to a mental asylum, or they called other expressions, right the way, you rewired people, because you’ve got electricity in the brain. You passed electricity through the brain to read. So if you look back to how they treated what they called, you know, and mental patients, as they called, where we have the all those, the way they did it to redo the brain was by passing electrical cool. So you put them in water, a bath, you put electrodes on them, and he passed electricity through them, and that was in the UK in the 70s. And if you think about where we are now today,
Speaker 1 22:47
right? It’s such a shift. Yeah, it’s such
Malcolm Staves 22:51
and yet we’re not happy. But we should see the we should sometimes behind and see the progress and knowing because of what we’re talking about now. And I know we’ve digressed a bit, where we’re actually going on, where the future is, yeah, the future, the future is getting better. Yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 23:07
oh, yes. As overall, no, I agree. And it takes for more more leaders like yourself to be that luminary, to be role modeling like you say that there’s a really good book called leading below the surface by La Tonya Wilkins. And she really articulates, you know, when someone defines something that you’re like, Yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking of. It’s that ability to be in the moment in a room, surface level leadership versus deep level leadership. And surface level leadership is where you’re leading from a shallow pool. But deep leadership is where you’re able to in the room, be able to tune in the not to the non verbal communication. And that’s happening, be observing in the corners of the room those that are maybe a bit more visibly excluded from the group dynamics, and then you can sort of get in and intervene and help support, ask open questions. You know, do a pulse check. How are you that all this is, is having that those spidey senses, as I like to think of them, to how your team are, and to know changes in character and that that takes to have that open and approachable empathy, grounded relationship with your team? Yeah,
Malcolm Staves 24:20
and it also sort of comes back to and, you know, we need a shift change in in leadership and the way they see leadership productivity, but in what I’d like to call people centric, right? And how, how do you put them first before everything else? So how many people come to work in the morning whereby they’ve had a tough night? Yeah, kids have been on been in hospital or an emergency, the partner has been ill, or whatever. They come to work in the morning, and the boss sees that they’re not quite the same as usual, right? But he does nothing. The majority of what people call themselves leaders, and that’s another subject we should talk about. Yeah, and they see that they’re not quite themselves. But you know, they still give them a five ton forklift truck, which is a killing machine to drive, when really what they should be doing is saying, I can see you’re not quite right. Do you want to talk about it? Okay? You don’t want to talk about it, but what I’ll do is, why don’t we just do something else for today? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re not quite there yet. We’re not quite there and and that’s why people that talk about mental health and it hasn’t got an impact on health and safety. Why should we do it? We should just focus on the big accidents, which there is people, people that are not themselves at work, are a liability to themselves and to the others that they’re working with, potentially. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 25:40
yeah. That is true. That’s true. And that’s where, if you’re having people physically present, you want them to be mentally present as well, especially if they’re going to be doing some some risky operations. So we’ve got normal the conversation we’ve just had would normally be the middle of the chat, I like getting to know the person behind the you know the person that’s in front of me. So if you’ve still got time, I’d love to keep, keep, keep going. My time is your time. This is fun, fabulous. So tell us a bit about the young Malcolm. What were you always going to be a chemical engineer working in health and safety. How did you get to where you’re
Malcolm Staves 26:23
at? The real young, Malcolm staves, right? I mean, the real young was going to be captain of a spaceship, and he was going to Eddie, was going to wear way out into the universe. And I was influenced by things like Star Trek, which was in the 60s, Doctor Who was the time travel and and then at the end of the 60s, people landed on the moon. Oh, of course, of course. And I was totally captivated, so I had a plan. And the plan was to, in order to get to where I wanted to be, which was to be captain of a starship, I obviously had to go to the moon,
Speaker 1 27:03
right? Big plan. So
Malcolm Staves 27:06
in order to go to the moon, I had to join NASA. To join NASA, I needed to be a test pilot. Yeah, to be a test pilot, I needed to fly a fighter aircraft. So I had to join the Royal Air Force, right? In order to join the Royal Air Force, I needed a degree. And the logical degree, because of everybody around me that I was seeing that was doing this kind of stuff, were all engineers, right, right? So I needed an engineering degree. Didn’t know what, right? And in order to get a degree and go to university, I needed to go to what, at the time was called a grammar school. They used to have grammar and secondary modern do a special test, and that was going to be a challenge, I thought, for me, because I love life, but I worked hard, and I started off, I went to unit, I went to the grammar school. Did well engineering to University next step, and I joined the the Training Corps, which is the equivalent of the cadets to scouts. Got my my flight, my riders, pilots license, my flying license as well. Before I was 18, everything was on track, right except, but we weren’t really going into space, because we stopped the space program in 72 but I was on track, and so I joined. I decided I was going to still next step University engineering. Didn’t know what I was going to do. I chose chemical engineering. It was going to be between chemical and mechanical, right? Like I thought that would be the other one. Yeah, yeah. So I just chose that. Got to university, went to Freshers week to join the university Earth Squadron, because obviously I need to do that part of the step. And queued outside for Freshers Week. So I was almost one of the first in, almost one of the first in. And when I got there, they said, We’re full. I said, but not possible. He said, Well, we had some people from last year, and we’ve got the intake of those that are actually being sponsored. Got RAF flying scholar scholarships or sponsored to university. We got no places left. My dream was shattered. In that little conversation that guy in front of me didn’t know how he just shattered my dream. I kept on with Star Trek and all the rest of it, and Doctor Who, I still love them. I still watch those, but now I’m into chemical engineering. And I got, I got sponsored by by British Steel, and that was sort of like how I got into the chemical engineering aspect, right? And I actually did hazops, because I was actually trained at university. I’m proud of this by Trevor klettz. Oh, cool. So he was at Loughborough University, where I went to, and the guy called Frank, Frank Lee’s, who’d written quite a few books on loss prevention and stuff like that, yeah, really brilliant. People, and they, they inspired me. So I now had new inspiration, right? I knew there was no NASA program going to the moon and and all the rest of it. And I got involved. I got involved with that. And then eventually, right, believe it or not, I moved to a consultancy whereby I was doing environmental work, right? And they asked me if I could do health and safety. And when you’re a consultancy, you say yes to everything, and then you you try and find a way to do it. So I got into a little bit of health and safety, but then I left them and I joined my my number one client. And that was pure environment, right? And what I actually did was, at the time I took one, I took the first company in worldwide, in my organization, to 14,001 cool, which was apparently one of the first companies worldwide, worldwide to go 14,001 because it was the day it became official. It transformed from something called British Standard 775, oh, and the data transformation was something like early October 96 I was all geared right to go on on the first day, as soon as possible, wow. Because my dad used to say to me, and I don’t know whether it’s right, he says, Nobody remembers the person who comes second,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:27
yeah, yeah, yeah,
Malcolm Staves 31:29
it’s you. It’s got 14,001 was first. And as a result, I ended up being promoted two years later, because I became a little bit of a celebrity, a big name in the company, a global company, an aluminum company, and they brought me to Paris. So that’s how I ended up in Paris and but when I got the 14,001 they then turned around to me and my this particular division, European Division, said, we’re struggling with health and safety. You seem to have got a good way of doing the environment. Can you apply the same approach to health and safety. And my first reaction was, well, I know hazard, I know process safety stuff, but maybe health and safety is a bit like the environment, and all you do is take the environment out the word, put safety, and then you put a system in place. Yeah. And I started with putting systems in aligned with with 14,001 at the time, and that’s how I got into it. I found my holy grail. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Oh, I Yeah, completely can relate. That’s so cool that you were taught by Trevor klettz. I, and I and yeah, Lee, Frank, Lee’s, yeah, I recognize the name from, like, some fundamental safety textbooks I was taught by Professor Stephen Richardson at Imperial. So he, he,
Malcolm Staves 32:55
I’ve still got all these books. Do you
Speaker 1 32:57
know Steve? Yeah,
Malcolm Staves 32:58
what the call? What was they called? It was Coulson and Richardson. Yes, the books, it was five or six of them on a volume. I couldn’t throw them away. They were my Bible,
Mark McBride-Wright 33:07
yeah, yeah, yeah. So he taught me, and he gave me the opportunity to come to Imperial, you know, I remember, you know, I remember I couldn’t attend my interview at Imperial. What because my had my prelims, as we called them, like mock exams, basically. So I deferred, and I ended up going on my 17th birthday down to South Kensington. And I had originally thrown out the prospectus for Imperial the prior October when I saw the entry requirements, because I hadn’t done as well in my hires in Scotland as I’d wanted to. So I was like, I’m never going to get that, no way. And then I’ve forgotten about the institution. I still applied. And then I went down to London, and I was really nervous about being able to get an A in chemistry, because I’d got a B in higher and I thought, I’ll never get I’ll never get that. Well, met Stephen met, I have to call him Stephen there, but to me still Professor Richardson. But he said to me, Mark, stop calling me Professor Richardson. And he sat down and told him my story. And I was one of those weird students when you could still do it. I went to Imperial with chemistry, maths and French. I didn’t have, you would never get in with that now, but, but, but he, he gave me an entry record, entry of an A and two b’s. So it totally took the pressure off the A had to be in maths, but it took the pressure off the chemistry, and I still got an A in chemistry. I got two A’s and a B but, and then he became my personal tutor, because that was the process at Chem engine and period. Engel Imperial, the the academic who interviewed you, then became your personal tutor, if you accepted, and then started in subsequent October. So, so anyway, he and then he taught me process safety as well, and just he’s always and then he made his way up through the faculty. You. Head of the faculty engineering, and sort of I learned about him. I learned about Piper Alpha and all that through him. And so when I when I finished my undergrad and then did my PhD, I my PhD, I enjoyed that, but I really had to do some self reflection on what I had enjoyed undergraduate for what I then wanted to do in industry, and it was safety all the way, and I’ve then gone into safety and just sort of kept in touch. And what I love about, I guess, maybe that band of people that that went through training and, you know, in engineering, you know, I’m, I feel like I’m in that bridging generation, you know, between the graduates and all that coming through now, and people like yourself who studied and were taught by Trevor kletz, and that I used to work with David Edwards, who was taught by Trevor klettz as well. I think, you know, I used to work with him at granhorn And so, yeah, it’s such a small community, isn’t it? But it is.
Malcolm Staves 36:06
It’s also tying the link with, if I can, with health and safety. So it always surprises me and makes me feel sad when I see process safety and chemical engineering and occupational health and safety, uh, two different silos. Yes, because at the end of the day, when you get process design wrong, you kill multiple number of people. Yes, it’s really, really big. And what I’ve been able to do with my background of chemical engineering, and then I’ve fallen into health and safety. Yes, I mix the two. I do process safety, engineer, process safety in L’Oreal because, you know, we put things together, we transform raw materials using heat, whatever, and we transform them into into products, right? Yeah, and we and when things go wrong, they could go wrong like any manufacturing plant, you know, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, etc. So you process safety has got to get right. Yeah, for a lot of companies, process safety, and occupational health and safety are not together, yes, and it’s sad. I think we’ve got a missed opportunity, a mixed opportunity to I think there’s, there’s, there’s more about it. For example, you know, you’ve heard about these companies. We talk about serious injury and fatality prevention programs. We call them in L’Oreal life, because nobody knows what a SIP is when you talk to senior managers, but everybody, if you give it a nice name. So it’s marketing from L’Oreal life, as in life changing incidental fatality event. Okay, we have a we have a top down program called Life one and life two, and it is all engineering process safety controls that stops the worst case scenario ever happening. Brilliant, because it’s ever happened in L’Oreal, but it could have happened elsewhere, or it might just happen in a million years. And then after that, the stuff that’s Occupational Health and Safety then comes in, like work at height, right? Yeah, confined space entry and stuff like that. But you can design out so much now, somebody that doesn’t have the balanced of the two, surely you can’t think of either, yeah, a process safety person struggles to think of occupational health and safety and the maybe even the that’s why we have human factors trying to Yes. You know about the bridge to two and to less or less success? Yeah? And an occupational health and safety person can’t look at a vessel and know exactly what’s going on or how to design it to make it fail safe.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:29
Yeah? Just kidding, yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s I’ve noticed. So I recently, Well, recently, a couple of years ago, joined UCL as a visiting professor in inclusive engineering education. And UCL has got an interest in program where it’s it’s the integrated engineering program, so it’s a common degree program across the first two years, and then you specialize, but you’re still doing technical things in your department of choice, your subject of choice. What I realized I had a bias as a chemical engineer with regards to safety, that I thought every type of engineer understood safety as a chemical engineer does, and that I realized was reinforced from working in industry, but in the concept design phase, so really early on, when you are more collaborative as a project team and not so entrenched in your silo, because the design has become so large. And I was like, oh my goodness, you know, there we there’s a bit of grounding work to do, leveling work to do, even in process, safety, education in the in the, in the university undergraduate world, you know, of training future engineers,
Malcolm Staves 39:41
I think, I think it’s a failure of actually the education systems, both in America, when I look at chemical engineering, in France, they have something called almost chemical engineering, and in the UK as well, that we do not integrate the. To sufficiently, yeah, and, and then when you look at the associations, I can be equivalent in the US, IOSH, National Safety Council, they don’t come together, yeah, you know, we took, we talked earlier about the hazards conference, right? Yeah. How many times do we bring external people in about occupational health and safety and how that can be integrated into an into, I’m going to say integrated thinking process of bringing process safety and occupational health and safety together, because they’re not they’re not siloed. They are interrelated. Do
Mark McBride-Wright 40:37
you know that there’s that? So I need to get a copy of it again. Some of this works already been done. And it it was by, it’s by. I’m going to get her name wrong, Kanga Marie, Professor Maria Kanga from Engineers Australia. And she’s, they’ve done some work. They did some work on leading and lagging indicators with process safety education. I’ll need to dig it out. This conversation has just reminded me of it, but
Malcolm Staves 41:09
an integrating occupational health and safety as well. Yeah, maybe Trish Kerry was involved with that, maybe at that time as well. Possibly,
Mark McBride-Wright 41:16
possibly. Yeah, I do you know what? I think we we need to sync up more. Actually,
Malcolm Staves 41:24
we should do podcasts. You’ll see, you’ll see Trish in, in, in Berkeley, in so
Mark McBride-Wright 41:33
tell me yes. So in the lat. So I want to get onto the quickfire questions in a moment. But tell us about your safety on the edge conference, and what people can expect and how to engage with with it later on in the year, in 2025 as well.
Malcolm Staves 41:48
Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit of a dream that I want to do a number of I’ve been to a lot of conferences whereby I struggle, whereby you pay, and very often you’re listening in to a lot of people trying to sell the business, and yeah, made a lot of money where you’re really there to network, to learn from other companies, and go to talk to the people that you want to talk about. And I’ve seen this getting a little bit worse. Sometimes the presentations when you’re at conferences are not at the right level, because the actual the conference people don’t actually check the presentations. They don’t check whether there’s any duplication with any others. Okay, you struggle. They basically get you to because of your name to be up there. What do you want to talk about? This is what I’m going to talk about, but the actual content is not looked at. And at the same time, I wanted to do something that was, I’m going to say, free, a bit like people sustainability that we talked about, yeah. However, I found it wasn’t possible for for lots of reasons, because you’re flying, flying people to be present, etc. But so the idea I want to do something low cost, value added, yeah, I also wanted to break the silos between occupational health and safety and research, right? The thing is, with research is it’s very important, right? Except for just too much of it that comes out. So part of you being, or anybody being seen as being a professor for a PhD student, or whatever is the number of articles sometimes that you produce, the problem is too many articles kill the articles that are important and that can add value. And as a practitioner, I can’t see the stuff when I look out there that is adding value. And then you get some stuff coming out there, out the research because of social media, because the way people sell it, or whatever, that something that is dangerous becomes mainstream, potentially, right, but it hasn’t had the studies done properly, but it because of the social impact. So I wanted to try and say, Okay, let’s try and bring industry and research closer together, so that research understands the needs better of industry, so it can target research and industry could be the test ground for research at the same time. So we create a better relationship. That’s one thing. I also want to break the silos between process safety for the reasons we said process safety, and that’s why I’ve got, I’ve got the American Institute of Chemical engineers there, I’ve got ASSP National Safety Council, all these big organizations with the idea of starting the discussion. Yeah, okay. And, and it was all these kind of things, and I didn’t want to, as I said, I want to do it for free to start off with, and we want to do it for free. And I teamed up with some other people as well, but obviously we’ve now got sponsors in and then one of the guys that I’m working with is a guy called Corey Corey pizza, oh yeah, and he’s a brilliant guy, hearts in the right place. Just wants to make a difference. Yeah, and really, really good, but he’s a businessman. They said, Look, Malcolm, you know, we won’t be able to even target break even. I said, Well, why not? I mean, this is the naive Malcolm here. He says, because if you target break even, you will make a loss, right? Because you’re targeting, so we should target to make a profit, yes, right? And as a result, we shouldn’t make loss, and maybe we will do because we start up first year, yes. So then we sat down so, well, we don’t want to make money. That’s not the objective, right? Yeah. So we then decided that all money will go to charity, right? And the portion that is L’Oreal’s right? And I suppose you could say I’m a bit biased in this decision, because I’m involved with it, we’ll go to dementia, because I lost my mum through dementia, right, right? And it just seemed to be right. So and Corey with his if there is profit, we’ll put it to another charity, because we’re not out about making money. We just want to put good content delivered by good people that adds value to our profession, and not the profession of process chemical engineering or or occupational health and safety, but to a profession that actually wants to save lives and make a difference.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:10
I like, I like what you’re doing. It’s so sort of nucleating the start of this collaboration that we’ve been talking about that has been lacking. And what I love that you’re doing as well is that your your safety professional by background, you’re curating an event that is being curated by a professional. The criticism that often these events are led by event media companies who are just charging high rates to fill the expensive floor space and then don’t check anything I’d never observed or thought about that before. It’s such a good point. But that then means that people come into your event will experience a highly curated, um piece of work. You know that that’s looked at the contribution of each speaker, them all together in concert with one another, so it’s all complimentary. And having been a speaker that’s gone through that process for the global people Summit, sustainability summit, I can say that that is the case. You know, you do do that,
Malcolm Staves 47:10
which is great. I’d like to, this is totally selfish as well, right? And so allow me this bit of self indulgence. I actually want to, we want to put on something that I would want to go to Yes, yes, right? That’s sort of my benchmark, and, and, and then it also means that I get to do some cool stuff, because, for example, right? I will actually do a fireside chat, right? I have a little bit of flexibility of the kind of thing that I could do a fireside chat on stage with probably one of the most famous people when it comes to behavioral based safety, which is Tom Krause, right? And I will actually meet him. He doesn’t travel much more, and he’s traveling less and less because he’s in his 80 I will have a fireside chat with him that for me, I would even pay, yeah, fantastic. It’s like, it’s like, being able to sit down, maybe an interview Trevor klettz or, you know, kind of thing, yeah, but yeah, no, no, I’m looking forward to it. And it might be, you know, it might be the biggest flop in the world, because we’re startup, we’ve never done it, but our heart’s in the right place, and we just got to try.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:22
I don’t think it will be, I don’t think it will be okay, right? This is quickfire questions, so an energy here. We’ve had a lot of energy already. We have, we have no, no. I mean, I mean, I mean, as in short answers,
Malcolm Staves 48:38
can we do that? We’re
Mark McBride-Wright 48:40
gonna try right? What’s the most rewarding part of your job meeting people? What’s one habit you’ve developed that has been key to your success in safety, leadership, networking, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Malcolm Staves 48:59
Wow, actually, it was from my dad, if it’s a long, long time ago, because he set me on the path. But very quickly, if it’s important for your boss, it’s important for you,
Mark McBride-Wright 49:14
that’s a good one. What’s your favorite day to what’s your favorite way to invite what’s your favorite way to unwind after a challenging day.
Malcolm Staves 49:23
That’s easy. So before I actually get in the house, because I don’t want to take all my baggage with me, right, I will park the car 510, minutes away from home, right? And I play unsainted by Slipknot as loud as you can imagine. I sing. I sing, and I play once, twice, three times, until everything goes away. And then when I go home to Karen and the kids when they were younger, I was cool. I don’t know if you know, slipped up, but I’m a big I’m a big heavy metal fan, and I go. To heavy metal festivals with my boys and all the rest of it, and it evacuates.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:06
Oh, I love that word evacuate. Yeah, great, great. That idea of depressurization of the mind, yeah. If you could implement one change across the global safety landscape, what would it be? I
Malcolm Staves 50:23
One change across the global I would bring process safety and occupational health and safety together.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:30
What’s your favorite safety innovation or tool that you’ve seen recently?
Malcolm Staves 50:39
Favorite innovation or tool that I’ve seen recently, I actually it’s, can I do a program? It’s a program that we have in L’Oreal actually, so I’m biased, called safe at work, Safe at Home, and there’s no KPI, no roadmap, no nothing, just a logo and a mindset of exporting what we do, our culture at work, into our homes, into our families, into local environments. So it means, like when you do a training session, at the end, you say, okay, so how would you apply that at home? It means people going home with fire extinguishers and creating discussions.
Speaker 1 51:19
I remember sharing
Mark McBride-Wright 51:20
that, yeah, you got a fire extinguisher into someone else once, didn’t you? Yeah, and they put out a fire.
Malcolm Staves 51:25
Or it means taking employees into schools and making a difference in in townships and slum areas, just to kids, which gives them true sense of purpose. Yeah, that is the is the most incredible. And believe it or not, no initiative, no, no, like I said, No, KPIs or anything, is just wonderful, and it fuels me every day, yeah, seeing the difference you can make. So I know it’s a big program, or the companies do something similar, I’m sure, but it just really, really works, and it creates employees that become safety ambassadors, because the senior the importance of the safety beyond, yeah, beyond that, the gates of L’Oreal. So anyway, that’s not a short one. I’m sorry,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:07
no, well, it’s a beautiful one to conclude on. So if, if people want to get in touch with you, Malcolm, how? How should they do that?
Malcolm Staves 52:16
I’m definitely LinkedIn. I like communicating on LinkedIn. I have a hashtag, which is hashtag, be the hummingbird, connect with me on LinkedIn, and, and, yeah, no, that’s the best way. Brilliant.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:29
Well, we’ll put the link in the transcript in the show not show notes. Really enjoyed chatting with you. Malcolm, thank you so much. Thank you.
Malcolm Staves 52:38
Thank you very much. And just one thing, if I want to say this right at the end, yeah, right. Just for everybody’s information, we didn’t get through any of the questions that were
Mark McBride-Wright 52:47
pre planned at the beginning. No, we didn’t.
Malcolm Staves 52:51
The podcast of the best, the best. That’s the best way to do a podcast. Thank you, Mark.
E022: We need more hummingbirds in the world
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Malcolm Staves 0:01
It starts recording. There we go.
Mark McBride-Wright 0:06
Hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m delighted today to be joined by Malcolm Steves, who is the global vice president of health and safety at L’Oreal. So Malcolm is a globally recognized environmental health and safety professional with a career spanning over 16 years at L’Oreal, where he serves as global vice president of health and safety, passionate about embedding sustainable high performance cultural change. Malcolm is an advocate of the hummingbird theory, which emphasizes the power of small, impactful actions to drive meaningful transformation. In addition to his role at L’Oreal Malcolm, has contributed to advancing occupational health and safety as an occupational health and safety strategic partner with the capitals coalition and as Vice Chairman of the advisory board for the Center for safety and health sustainability. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at Bureau Veritas and Alcan packaging, further solidifying his experience in health, safety and sustainability, a recipient of prestigious accolades such as the Ross guardian angel award in 2018 and the corporate health and safety influencer award in 2022 Malcolm’s vision extends beyond organizational boundaries, promoting global collaboration to save lives. Malcolm, Well,
Malcolm Staves 1:35
hi, thank you. Was a pleasure to be here.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:38
I am so happy to have been able to get a little slice of your time. You’re a very busy man.
Malcolm Staves 1:44
I seem to be all over the place, but you know, it’s my passion, and I love what I do. Are
Mark McBride-Wright 1:48
you going to send me some, like, complimentary hair samples or something from L’Oreal?
Malcolm Staves 1:54
Not a problem, not a problem at all. But I’ll need to check your color and what type you want. But anyway, no problem. No problem. I thought you might, I thought you might, know, probably should ask for Prada or Valentina, or if someone wrong that I can get you more easily, right?
Mark McBride-Wright 2:10
Okay, I’ll go for the more premium end stuff. We, so we met, um, working backwards. We, I can’t remember how I found out about the global people sustainability summit, but I, oh, I came and gave a talk on a panel, I think, in the London one. And that was when we think that was the when we first crossed paths. And it was, it was very rarely have I seen a chemical engineer, a fellow chemical engineer in the Occupational Health and Safety space. You know, usually when I see other chemical engineers, it’s in the process safety, technical side of things. So I was really excited to see the fi Kim e after your name, and then the fact that I only found out after the global people sustainability event about your hummingbird talk and what I think I watched it on the end of day one, because one of the one of the delegates was wearing one of the brooches that you Yes, the listeners are probably now wondering, What on earth is Mark talking about? So can you just, can you, can you talk us through about the hummingbird theory and all that, and why you give out brooches and what the talks about?
Malcolm Staves 3:38
It is quite a nice story, actually, because many, many years ago, within L’Oreal, I was looking to visualize brand almost what we do in health and safety and and the reason behind it, without having lots of words about objectives and visions or whatever, which obviously we have. And I came across through somebody else that I was working with this hummingbird story, which was primarily comes from Latin America, children’s story from, like, the Inca era kind of thing, many, many years ago. But an environmental person had actually taken it on board as a way of saying to everybody, you know, no matter what’s going on, no matter how small we are, we all can make a contribution. And she went on set and protect the planet, but and the visualization behind the story is, is a forest fire, right? And all the animals rush out. It’s a children’s story, and all the big animals, all the rest of it, but obviously there’s some animals left behind because there may be ill or whatever. And this little hummingbird, this really little hummingbird, flies out, goes to the river, picks up a bit of water, and goes backwards and forwards and tries to put the fire out. And eventually, the little animal said, Well, you know, you’re absolutely crazy. You know, what are you trying to do? You’re having no impact or whatever. And the little hummingbird. They’ll stop and sort of says, well, at least I’m doing the best I can, and every little bit counts, right? Yeah. And then one by one, I like to see the story going forward, which is not actually in the film, to say that one by one, the other animals all come together because, because the Humber showing a showing leadership, leadership of care, trying to make a difference. And one by one, they all come to help, and they put out the fire, thus saving their friends, saving the environment, etc. And even though I’ve mixed things a bit because it was an environmental story, but I saw the impact of a massive fire right on people’s lives, on health, etc, the damage to the pollution of pollution to the river, etc, impacts the fish, etc. So I saw a bigger story. You could say, yeah. So I just internalized it. Everybody laughed at me to start off with, right? I mean, this was 2010 2011 I put it as a in our policy, like in the background of what, you know, like, like a watermark, etc. But bit by bit, it grew, you know, it stuck with people. It got momentum. And now it’s wherever you go in L’Oreal, you’ll see the hummingbird somewhere associated with health and safety communications, and now environmental health and safety. So it’s gone back to the environmental people, and for example, of our warehousing, and I’m so I love this, our warehouse in Mexico as a, I would say, a four meter by four meter hummingbird on the wall. Does it? Right? You go to a site in Mexico where there are hummingbirds, they’ve created a hummingbird garden, right? Wow. In India, we, you know, we have a program called keeping it safe, right? Yeah, whereby we go into townships, slums and take education. But we actually have a school that we fund, and we funded it for a long time as a company, and I told all the kids the hummingbird story, and they wanted it to be a horror story. I mean, these are little kids in slums in India, horror story. Anyhow, the bottom result is, when they walk into school in the morning, they now have big hummingbird painted on the wall to remind them that they can make a difference. Oh, wow. And then, just to finish as well, and I’ve taken up a bit of time, is that, but the next step is that if, if you and I do a little bit every day for environment, health and safety, or just kindness, right? Yeah, then that’s not bad. But then if other people do it, and 1000 people, 5000 10,000 etc, together, we can make a big difference. So it’s it’s also a nice way to talk about the story of marginal gains. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And it’s just become a way of life. It’s just grown and grown and grown and I, and I give to people that have make it make a difference, people that I know, for my my female friends, they get a badge with a hummingbird badge and whatever. And my male friends will typically get some cufflinks with hummingbirds on that. Oh,
Speaker 1 8:10
nice, nice, nice. Thank you. Nice. Love that I love that you’ve
Mark McBride-Wright 8:16
got me You’ve got me. Thinking, is there some analogy in my safe leader thing that I’m sort of coming to market now with my book and my training course. Maybe there’s, maybe we’ve just finished a delivery of a pilot with rolls. Royce, SMR, so we’ve got 12 amazing, amazing, amazing leaders. Some are already established leaders. Some are it’s their first leadership role, and they’re about to, you know, grow a team, essentially. And so they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re figuring that out. We, we’ve gone through this journey of so safe stands for share, act, feel and empower, this circle that people go around where you have to first understand your own difference, what’s your own story, to contribute to the world. And so we create space for individuals to self explore that, and that’s something that we don’t often do as engineers and as men, to be honest, totally and so we get, we give space for that. We bring in some public training, public speaking training as well, to do your anchor story. So it gives it there’s a sort of by product benefit that we’re actually creating better communicators in the learners themselves, and then we take them through this idea of acting or feeling, and then being a source of empowerment for for others,
Malcolm Staves 9:28
my training, they’re hummingbirds. They’re hummingbird mother,
Mark McBride-Wright 9:31
that’s what I mean. There’s similarities like total collective and by getting each of them to be like a lighthouse, you know, if we had so, I guess the light a lighthouse is almost like an analogy to your hummingbird. If you’ve got lots of hummingbirds going to get what are the volumes larger? If you’ve got more lighthouses being turned on with people sharing their stories about things that we can’t see from looking at them, then we’ve got more moments of connection where we’ll have empathy and we can find out about how that. And I see this in male populations, like men are conditioned to hold up the guard, not be vulnerable, be natural, etc, so prevalent in engineering. And you know, we’ve got some of the highest suicide rates in the sector as well. So wow, yeah. Though, this is why, whenever I deliver to, you know, an engineering business, it’s, it’s like, oh, right, okay, we get it, you know. And they’ve tried X, Y and Z to engage the workforce on Ed and I we’re seeing that play out, that narrative play out politically now, where people have felt alienated, disenfranchised, told that they’re the cause of the problem. And so it’s very shallow, the impact that’s then returned. So my aha moment was when I started doing equal engineers. And I discovered these statistics from the Office of National Statistics in the UK. And I was like, Well, that can’t be right. You know, we would never tolerate such a high rate of loss of life from a safety perspective, physical safety perspective, we would design it out. We would eradicate it. We would reduce it to as low as reasonably practicable and then manage residual risk and blah, blah, blah engineer. Yeah, exactly. I know. I know it’s in my DNA. So, so this intersectional perspective of safety engineer, but also a fledgling dei practitioner, I was like, there must be a hook in here, a way we can get more men to engage with dei when we lead with these statistics. So that was why we did our masculinity and engineering research at Eco engineers, because I didn’t believe the data. So we’ve done two rounds of research. We got nearly 800 respondents in each round, yeah, once in 2018 and once in 2021, and in both surveys, one in five reported losing a work colleague to suicide, and one in five reported suicidal ideation or self harm. Personally, that number went up to one in four in the 2021 data, we’ve got the survey open again now. It’s going to be a longitudinal study that we do every three years, but this that this is my journey to the safe leader, because I was like the way we’re doing dei just isn’t working. It can live within safety, and we need to leverage the familiarity the engineers have with physical safety, extend that to psychological safety. And then, to your point, by getting more people becoming lighthouses or hummingbirds, will start to dismantle this hostility that we face, you know,
Malcolm Staves 12:24
people, but also you’re right, it’s also some of the taboos as well, isn’t it? Yeah, so sometimes you’ve just got to put the word out, because when you put out the word suicide, right, the first reaction is, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to go there for a lot of people, right? Yeah. But like with, again, the hummingbird or the lighthouse, the more we talk about it, and the more we put it out there, then the more it will become accepted, maybe not for in the next six months or one year or whatever, but as you put it out. And one of the most remarkable people that talks about suicide by her experience, almost experience, because she often says that she actually shouldn’t be here today, kind of thing. And I know she wouldn’t mind me saying that is, is Rosie Russell, and Rosie as one of the most I’m going to say how. I don’t know if the word is heartfelt, but it really rams it home, the importance of it. She talks about, I think it’s got something like the 7c of suicide, the different levels that people go before it’s okay, it’s too late. And You’ve almost got to be able and this is where the hummingbird comes in again. Sometimes you’ve got to be able to see the low level signals, the changes in somebody. And you’ve got to be brave enough to actually go and try and have a conversation. Yes, and that all it needs, right? Sometimes it all it needs. I mean, you can’t. We’re not psychiatrists, we’re engineers, we’re chemical engineers. We’re not We’re not psychologists either, but we can see changes in people, yes, yes, you know.
Mark McBride-Wright 13:57
And you know that this is why I think safety has just got the framework already to allow this to be retooled that we can move through the all the headwinds that are in front of us with this new administration in the US and stuff. Because to your point, it’s all about, you know that I always draw bringing engineering idioms when we’re doing our training and it the engineers like it. You know, they might not be engineers, but they work in an engineer an organization, and they work with engineers so they get and the, you know, the linkage to safety is so helpful because, you know, people never question whether or not you should intervene if someone’s physical safety is at risk, and then if you are able to intervene, the need to then get medical attention. Like there is a, there is a bounded expectation on your ability to intervene being a non medical professional. But it’s, it’s the same, in my view, it’s the same with implementing Mental Health First Aid training. You know. And under so you’re then being trained in the frameworks and all that to be able to intervene when someone is showing signs. You’re receptive to these low level seeds, as you call them, off the early indicators, and then you’re more likely to intervene earlier to avoid what is an escalation to a top event, which is someone taking their own life, or even
Malcolm Staves 15:23
because of now we’re talking about mental health, which is also a subject that’s important to me. And in fact, I’m helping driving that program within L’Oreal due, okay, developing the framework and the guidelines, which between you and I, is not easy when you’re talking about global, yeah. I can imagine specific, yeah. But one of the things that I want to do, and this is where the engineering bit comes in, right? You know, we’re taught when we do things about prevention, stop it from happening in the first place. When you look at most of the mental health programs, they look at it after it’s a little bit too late to talk about the suicide, the depression and whatever. So but as an engineer, believe it or not, and what we’re going to do, what we’re putting in place at the moment, at the moment, is okay. How do we detect the low level signals? How do we help people on the prevention side, so that they don’t get in that situation? Some people talk about resilience, and sometimes I’m not too sure whether that’s the right word. But how do you absorb? How do you increase your capacity to to absorb stress? Or how do you change so that instead of being the macho engineer, you actually are prepared to open up and talk to other people? Yeah, right, and it’s so complex as well, and but the idea being in the way I look at the way we’re going to do it is okay. You need it when it when it starts to get serious, and that is not the manager or anybody else, right? That’s the professionals. Yeah, the manager has a role to play, and of creating the right work environment that somebody psychological safety is the buzzword, but it means that somebody who’s not feeling quite right could come and talk to me about it, and it could be a we don’t mental health is, I’m going to say, is a word that I struggle with sometimes, because it’s seen very negatively in many societies. So I think mental wellness is a mental well being is a much better, acceptable term for a lot of because for a lot of, a lot of people, and I think you can help people improve their mental wellness, right, by making them aware. And sometimes you can talk to a million people, and maybe only one person actually does takes on board what you what you’ve mentioned, and they do something about it, but that’s one life. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 17:43
I can tell you, from having done delivery and framed the conversation in this way to multiple organizations. Now the that in every instance, there’s always been a experience locally within that organization where this is real. So the number that to me, that experience of seeing the data from our research and from the ONS, but then the experience then delivering it in front of clients, and then see it become relatable, of someone in that on that site, for example, meet this was where I was really like, there is something in this, you know. And you’re right. Mental mental health can be a triggering word. You know, we all have mental health. It can be positive or negative or neutral, just like we all have physical health. It can be good, positive or neutral. It’s, it’s about finding the right, the right language. I love that it
Malcolm Staves 18:36
can change daily as well. It can, you know, you can be under a lot of stress at the moment, at the moment, and you’re really, really struggling. But because of again, I’m gonna use the word resilience. It’s not the right word. I struggle to find the right word. But you, it doesn’t tip you over the top, right? You, it’s elastic, right? And it brings you back. But if you stretch that elastic too much and too often it doesn’t go back to its original form. Yeah, and good analogy. I think it’s sort of important, and I also think slightly different, but it’s going to come back to it. So we launched a women in safety program as part of our big D, D, E, and I program within L’Oreal, and I have a lady in my team that’s completely passionate about it, and now she created a network of about 160 160 60 ladies. But what I also notice is that, you know, when you have more women in your team. People talk more testosterone battles for want of expression. You know about macho themes in meetings, and when you can reduce the tension even within the meetings, the discussions are done a little bit more on compromise, understanding and all the rest of it because of balance. Yes, yeah. And. Yeah. And I think that’s also a good way to create a cycle by having better balance. And this is gender I’m gonna say any gender balance, if I can, is, is it gives you the diversity which allows people to open up and to talk,
Mark McBride-Wright 20:18
yeah, right. And we’ve been lacking in that, due to a lack of balance in gender equality and engineering, you know.
Malcolm Staves 20:27
But you know, when you and I went to university, I mean, and did chemical engineering, I think I had was 60 of us, and two were women. The problem, the challenge being, is that with when they come through and take senior positions, yes, well, you know, the pool is still not balanced. There’s not even now enough chemical engineers that are women coming through university as an example kind of thing. You know, yeah, and, but it’s, it’s a fascinating subject. I could go on for it. But I think that this old whole thing about mental health is it’s also creating the right kind of work environment that people think they can trust you as a leader. Yeah, come and talk to them about the problems, and you’re not going to judge them, right? Yeah, you’re going to be there to listen. Or you can be the old fashioned macho and top down and, oh, you’ve got to, you’ve got to be a man kind of approach, and don’t cry and don’t Yeah, but what it needs is people like, I’m going to say like us and other people as well, to actually be role models to talk about this kind of subject. And bit by bit, the hummingbirds, my theory will be that bit by bit, other people will open up because you have done, and because I have done, and because other people have done. And the final thing to remember is we criticize very often where we are in the world or in respect to things like this, right? And if you take the UK as an example, because we both originally in the UK, 50 years ago, we were putting people that were getting stressed out, irritable, nervous and whatever. We were putting them in a bath of water, putting electrodes in their mouths and passing electricity through them. In the UK, it was when you went to a mental asylum, or they called other expressions, right the way, you rewired people, because you’ve got electricity in the brain. You passed electricity through the brain to read. So if you look back to how they treated what they called, you know, and mental patients, as they called, where we have the all those, the way they did it to redo the brain was by passing electrical cool. So you put them in water, a bath, you put electrodes on them, and he passed electricity through them, and that was in the UK in the 70s. And if you think about where we are now today,
Speaker 1 22:47
right? It’s such a shift. Yeah, it’s such
Malcolm Staves 22:51
and yet we’re not happy. But we should see the we should sometimes behind and see the progress and knowing because of what we’re talking about now. And I know we’ve digressed a bit, where we’re actually going on, where the future is, yeah, the future, the future is getting better. Yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 23:07
oh, yes. As overall, no, I agree. And it takes for more more leaders like yourself to be that luminary, to be role modeling like you say that there’s a really good book called leading below the surface by La Tonya Wilkins. And she really articulates, you know, when someone defines something that you’re like, Yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking of. It’s that ability to be in the moment in a room, surface level leadership versus deep level leadership. And surface level leadership is where you’re leading from a shallow pool. But deep leadership is where you’re able to in the room, be able to tune in the not to the non verbal communication. And that’s happening, be observing in the corners of the room those that are maybe a bit more visibly excluded from the group dynamics, and then you can sort of get in and intervene and help support, ask open questions. You know, do a pulse check. How are you that all this is, is having that those spidey senses, as I like to think of them, to how your team are, and to know changes in character and that that takes to have that open and approachable empathy, grounded relationship with your team? Yeah,
Malcolm Staves 24:20
and it also sort of comes back to and, you know, we need a shift change in in leadership and the way they see leadership productivity, but in what I’d like to call people centric, right? And how, how do you put them first before everything else? So how many people come to work in the morning whereby they’ve had a tough night? Yeah, kids have been on been in hospital or an emergency, the partner has been ill, or whatever. They come to work in the morning, and the boss sees that they’re not quite the same as usual, right? But he does nothing. The majority of what people call themselves leaders, and that’s another subject we should talk about. Yeah, and they see that they’re not quite themselves. But you know, they still give them a five ton forklift truck, which is a killing machine to drive, when really what they should be doing is saying, I can see you’re not quite right. Do you want to talk about it? Okay? You don’t want to talk about it, but what I’ll do is, why don’t we just do something else for today? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re not quite there yet. We’re not quite there and and that’s why people that talk about mental health and it hasn’t got an impact on health and safety. Why should we do it? We should just focus on the big accidents, which there is people, people that are not themselves at work, are a liability to themselves and to the others that they’re working with, potentially. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 25:40
yeah. That is true. That’s true. And that’s where, if you’re having people physically present, you want them to be mentally present as well, especially if they’re going to be doing some some risky operations. So we’ve got normal the conversation we’ve just had would normally be the middle of the chat, I like getting to know the person behind the you know the person that’s in front of me. So if you’ve still got time, I’d love to keep, keep, keep going. My time is your time. This is fun, fabulous. So tell us a bit about the young Malcolm. What were you always going to be a chemical engineer working in health and safety. How did you get to where you’re
Malcolm Staves 26:23
at? The real young, Malcolm staves, right? I mean, the real young was going to be captain of a spaceship, and he was going to Eddie, was going to wear way out into the universe. And I was influenced by things like Star Trek, which was in the 60s, Doctor Who was the time travel and and then at the end of the 60s, people landed on the moon. Oh, of course, of course. And I was totally captivated, so I had a plan. And the plan was to, in order to get to where I wanted to be, which was to be captain of a starship, I obviously had to go to the moon,
Speaker 1 27:03
right? Big plan. So
Malcolm Staves 27:06
in order to go to the moon, I had to join NASA. To join NASA, I needed to be a test pilot. Yeah, to be a test pilot, I needed to fly a fighter aircraft. So I had to join the Royal Air Force, right? In order to join the Royal Air Force, I needed a degree. And the logical degree, because of everybody around me that I was seeing that was doing this kind of stuff, were all engineers, right, right? So I needed an engineering degree. Didn’t know what, right? And in order to get a degree and go to university, I needed to go to what, at the time was called a grammar school. They used to have grammar and secondary modern do a special test, and that was going to be a challenge, I thought, for me, because I love life, but I worked hard, and I started off, I went to unit, I went to the grammar school. Did well engineering to University next step, and I joined the the Training Corps, which is the equivalent of the cadets to scouts. Got my my flight, my riders, pilots license, my flying license as well. Before I was 18, everything was on track, right except, but we weren’t really going into space, because we stopped the space program in 72 but I was on track, and so I joined. I decided I was going to still next step University engineering. Didn’t know what I was going to do. I chose chemical engineering. It was going to be between chemical and mechanical, right? Like I thought that would be the other one. Yeah, yeah. So I just chose that. Got to university, went to Freshers week to join the university Earth Squadron, because obviously I need to do that part of the step. And queued outside for Freshers Week. So I was almost one of the first in, almost one of the first in. And when I got there, they said, We’re full. I said, but not possible. He said, Well, we had some people from last year, and we’ve got the intake of those that are actually being sponsored. Got RAF flying scholar scholarships or sponsored to university. We got no places left. My dream was shattered. In that little conversation that guy in front of me didn’t know how he just shattered my dream. I kept on with Star Trek and all the rest of it, and Doctor Who, I still love them. I still watch those, but now I’m into chemical engineering. And I got, I got sponsored by by British Steel, and that was sort of like how I got into the chemical engineering aspect, right? And I actually did hazops, because I was actually trained at university. I’m proud of this by Trevor klettz. Oh, cool. So he was at Loughborough University, where I went to, and the guy called Frank, Frank Lee’s, who’d written quite a few books on loss prevention and stuff like that, yeah, really brilliant. People, and they, they inspired me. So I now had new inspiration, right? I knew there was no NASA program going to the moon and and all the rest of it. And I got involved. I got involved with that. And then eventually, right, believe it or not, I moved to a consultancy whereby I was doing environmental work, right? And they asked me if I could do health and safety. And when you’re a consultancy, you say yes to everything, and then you you try and find a way to do it. So I got into a little bit of health and safety, but then I left them and I joined my my number one client. And that was pure environment, right? And what I actually did was, at the time I took one, I took the first company in worldwide, in my organization, to 14,001 cool, which was apparently one of the first companies worldwide, worldwide to go 14,001 because it was the day it became official. It transformed from something called British Standard 775, oh, and the data transformation was something like early October 96 I was all geared right to go on on the first day, as soon as possible, wow. Because my dad used to say to me, and I don’t know whether it’s right, he says, Nobody remembers the person who comes second,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:27
yeah, yeah, yeah,
Malcolm Staves 31:29
it’s you. It’s got 14,001 was first. And as a result, I ended up being promoted two years later, because I became a little bit of a celebrity, a big name in the company, a global company, an aluminum company, and they brought me to Paris. So that’s how I ended up in Paris and but when I got the 14,001 they then turned around to me and my this particular division, European Division, said, we’re struggling with health and safety. You seem to have got a good way of doing the environment. Can you apply the same approach to health and safety. And my first reaction was, well, I know hazard, I know process safety stuff, but maybe health and safety is a bit like the environment, and all you do is take the environment out the word, put safety, and then you put a system in place. Yeah. And I started with putting systems in aligned with with 14,001 at the time, and that’s how I got into it. I found my holy grail. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 32:28
that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Oh, I Yeah, completely can relate. That’s so cool that you were taught by Trevor klettz. I, and I and yeah, Lee, Frank, Lee’s, yeah, I recognize the name from, like, some fundamental safety textbooks I was taught by Professor Stephen Richardson at Imperial. So he, he,
Malcolm Staves 32:55
I’ve still got all these books. Do you
Speaker 1 32:57
know Steve? Yeah,
Malcolm Staves 32:58
what the call? What was they called? It was Coulson and Richardson. Yes, the books, it was five or six of them on a volume. I couldn’t throw them away. They were my Bible,
Mark McBride-Wright 33:07
yeah, yeah, yeah. So he taught me, and he gave me the opportunity to come to Imperial, you know, I remember, you know, I remember I couldn’t attend my interview at Imperial. What because my had my prelims, as we called them, like mock exams, basically. So I deferred, and I ended up going on my 17th birthday down to South Kensington. And I had originally thrown out the prospectus for Imperial the prior October when I saw the entry requirements, because I hadn’t done as well in my hires in Scotland as I’d wanted to. So I was like, I’m never going to get that, no way. And then I’ve forgotten about the institution. I still applied. And then I went down to London, and I was really nervous about being able to get an A in chemistry, because I’d got a B in higher and I thought, I’ll never get I’ll never get that. Well, met Stephen met, I have to call him Stephen there, but to me still Professor Richardson. But he said to me, Mark, stop calling me Professor Richardson. And he sat down and told him my story. And I was one of those weird students when you could still do it. I went to Imperial with chemistry, maths and French. I didn’t have, you would never get in with that now, but, but, but he, he gave me an entry record, entry of an A and two b’s. So it totally took the pressure off the A had to be in maths, but it took the pressure off the chemistry, and I still got an A in chemistry. I got two A’s and a B but, and then he became my personal tutor, because that was the process at Chem engine and period. Engel Imperial, the the academic who interviewed you, then became your personal tutor, if you accepted, and then started in subsequent October. So, so anyway, he and then he taught me process safety as well, and just he’s always and then he made his way up through the faculty. You. Head of the faculty engineering, and sort of I learned about him. I learned about Piper Alpha and all that through him. And so when I when I finished my undergrad and then did my PhD, I my PhD, I enjoyed that, but I really had to do some self reflection on what I had enjoyed undergraduate for what I then wanted to do in industry, and it was safety all the way, and I’ve then gone into safety and just sort of kept in touch. And what I love about, I guess, maybe that band of people that that went through training and, you know, in engineering, you know, I’m, I feel like I’m in that bridging generation, you know, between the graduates and all that coming through now, and people like yourself who studied and were taught by Trevor kletz, and that I used to work with David Edwards, who was taught by Trevor klettz as well. I think, you know, I used to work with him at granhorn And so, yeah, it’s such a small community, isn’t it? But it is.
Malcolm Staves 36:06
It’s also tying the link with, if I can, with health and safety. So it always surprises me and makes me feel sad when I see process safety and chemical engineering and occupational health and safety, uh, two different silos. Yes, because at the end of the day, when you get process design wrong, you kill multiple number of people. Yes, it’s really, really big. And what I’ve been able to do with my background of chemical engineering, and then I’ve fallen into health and safety. Yes, I mix the two. I do process safety, engineer, process safety in L’Oreal because, you know, we put things together, we transform raw materials using heat, whatever, and we transform them into into products, right? Yeah, and we and when things go wrong, they could go wrong like any manufacturing plant, you know, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, etc. So you process safety has got to get right. Yeah, for a lot of companies, process safety, and occupational health and safety are not together, yes, and it’s sad. I think we’ve got a missed opportunity, a mixed opportunity to I think there’s, there’s, there’s more about it. For example, you know, you’ve heard about these companies. We talk about serious injury and fatality prevention programs. We call them in L’Oreal life, because nobody knows what a SIP is when you talk to senior managers, but everybody, if you give it a nice name. So it’s marketing from L’Oreal life, as in life changing incidental fatality event. Okay, we have a we have a top down program called Life one and life two, and it is all engineering process safety controls that stops the worst case scenario ever happening. Brilliant, because it’s ever happened in L’Oreal, but it could have happened elsewhere, or it might just happen in a million years. And then after that, the stuff that’s Occupational Health and Safety then comes in, like work at height, right? Yeah, confined space entry and stuff like that. But you can design out so much now, somebody that doesn’t have the balanced of the two, surely you can’t think of either, yeah, a process safety person struggles to think of occupational health and safety and the maybe even the that’s why we have human factors trying to Yes. You know about the bridge to two and to less or less success? Yeah? And an occupational health and safety person can’t look at a vessel and know exactly what’s going on or how to design it to make it fail safe.
Mark McBride-Wright 38:29
Yeah? Just kidding, yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s I’ve noticed. So I recently, Well, recently, a couple of years ago, joined UCL as a visiting professor in inclusive engineering education. And UCL has got an interest in program where it’s it’s the integrated engineering program, so it’s a common degree program across the first two years, and then you specialize, but you’re still doing technical things in your department of choice, your subject of choice. What I realized I had a bias as a chemical engineer with regards to safety, that I thought every type of engineer understood safety as a chemical engineer does, and that I realized was reinforced from working in industry, but in the concept design phase, so really early on, when you are more collaborative as a project team and not so entrenched in your silo, because the design has become so large. And I was like, oh my goodness, you know, there we there’s a bit of grounding work to do, leveling work to do, even in process, safety, education in the in the, in the university undergraduate world, you know, of training future engineers,
Malcolm Staves 39:41
I think, I think it’s a failure of actually the education systems, both in America, when I look at chemical engineering, in France, they have something called almost chemical engineering, and in the UK as well, that we do not integrate the. To sufficiently, yeah, and, and then when you look at the associations, I can be equivalent in the US, IOSH, National Safety Council, they don’t come together, yeah, you know, we took, we talked earlier about the hazards conference, right? Yeah. How many times do we bring external people in about occupational health and safety and how that can be integrated into an into, I’m going to say integrated thinking process of bringing process safety and occupational health and safety together, because they’re not they’re not siloed. They are interrelated. Do
Mark McBride-Wright 40:37
you know that there’s that? So I need to get a copy of it again. Some of this works already been done. And it it was by, it’s by. I’m going to get her name wrong, Kanga Marie, Professor Maria Kanga from Engineers Australia. And she’s, they’ve done some work. They did some work on leading and lagging indicators with process safety education. I’ll need to dig it out. This conversation has just reminded me of it, but
Malcolm Staves 41:09
an integrating occupational health and safety as well. Yeah, maybe Trish Kerry was involved with that, maybe at that time as well. Possibly,
Mark McBride-Wright 41:16
possibly. Yeah, I do you know what? I think we we need to sync up more. Actually,
Malcolm Staves 41:24
we should do podcasts. You’ll see, you’ll see Trish in, in, in Berkeley, in so
Mark McBride-Wright 41:33
tell me yes. So in the lat. So I want to get onto the quickfire questions in a moment. But tell us about your safety on the edge conference, and what people can expect and how to engage with with it later on in the year, in 2025 as well.
Malcolm Staves 41:48
Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit of a dream that I want to do a number of I’ve been to a lot of conferences whereby I struggle, whereby you pay, and very often you’re listening in to a lot of people trying to sell the business, and yeah, made a lot of money where you’re really there to network, to learn from other companies, and go to talk to the people that you want to talk about. And I’ve seen this getting a little bit worse. Sometimes the presentations when you’re at conferences are not at the right level, because the actual the conference people don’t actually check the presentations. They don’t check whether there’s any duplication with any others. Okay, you struggle. They basically get you to because of your name to be up there. What do you want to talk about? This is what I’m going to talk about, but the actual content is not looked at. And at the same time, I wanted to do something that was, I’m going to say, free, a bit like people sustainability that we talked about, yeah. However, I found it wasn’t possible for for lots of reasons, because you’re flying, flying people to be present, etc. But so the idea I want to do something low cost, value added, yeah, I also wanted to break the silos between occupational health and safety and research, right? The thing is, with research is it’s very important, right? Except for just too much of it that comes out. So part of you being, or anybody being seen as being a professor for a PhD student, or whatever is the number of articles sometimes that you produce, the problem is too many articles kill the articles that are important and that can add value. And as a practitioner, I can’t see the stuff when I look out there that is adding value. And then you get some stuff coming out there, out the research because of social media, because the way people sell it, or whatever, that something that is dangerous becomes mainstream, potentially, right, but it hasn’t had the studies done properly, but it because of the social impact. So I wanted to try and say, Okay, let’s try and bring industry and research closer together, so that research understands the needs better of industry, so it can target research and industry could be the test ground for research at the same time. So we create a better relationship. That’s one thing. I also want to break the silos between process safety for the reasons we said process safety, and that’s why I’ve got, I’ve got the American Institute of Chemical engineers there, I’ve got ASSP National Safety Council, all these big organizations with the idea of starting the discussion. Yeah, okay. And, and it was all these kind of things, and I didn’t want to, as I said, I want to do it for free to start off with, and we want to do it for free. And I teamed up with some other people as well, but obviously we’ve now got sponsors in and then one of the guys that I’m working with is a guy called Corey Corey pizza, oh yeah, and he’s a brilliant guy, hearts in the right place. Just wants to make a difference. Yeah, and really, really good, but he’s a businessman. They said, Look, Malcolm, you know, we won’t be able to even target break even. I said, Well, why not? I mean, this is the naive Malcolm here. He says, because if you target break even, you will make a loss, right? Because you’re targeting, so we should target to make a profit, yes, right? And as a result, we shouldn’t make loss, and maybe we will do because we start up first year, yes. So then we sat down so, well, we don’t want to make money. That’s not the objective, right? Yeah. So we then decided that all money will go to charity, right? And the portion that is L’Oreal’s right? And I suppose you could say I’m a bit biased in this decision, because I’m involved with it, we’ll go to dementia, because I lost my mum through dementia, right, right? And it just seemed to be right. So and Corey with his if there is profit, we’ll put it to another charity, because we’re not out about making money. We just want to put good content delivered by good people that adds value to our profession, and not the profession of process chemical engineering or or occupational health and safety, but to a profession that actually wants to save lives and make a difference.
Mark McBride-Wright 46:10
I like, I like what you’re doing. It’s so sort of nucleating the start of this collaboration that we’ve been talking about that has been lacking. And what I love that you’re doing as well is that your your safety professional by background, you’re curating an event that is being curated by a professional. The criticism that often these events are led by event media companies who are just charging high rates to fill the expensive floor space and then don’t check anything I’d never observed or thought about that before. It’s such a good point. But that then means that people come into your event will experience a highly curated, um piece of work. You know that that’s looked at the contribution of each speaker, them all together in concert with one another, so it’s all complimentary. And having been a speaker that’s gone through that process for the global people Summit, sustainability summit, I can say that that is the case. You know, you do do that,
Malcolm Staves 47:10
which is great. I’d like to, this is totally selfish as well, right? And so allow me this bit of self indulgence. I actually want to, we want to put on something that I would want to go to Yes, yes, right? That’s sort of my benchmark, and, and, and then it also means that I get to do some cool stuff, because, for example, right? I will actually do a fireside chat, right? I have a little bit of flexibility of the kind of thing that I could do a fireside chat on stage with probably one of the most famous people when it comes to behavioral based safety, which is Tom Krause, right? And I will actually meet him. He doesn’t travel much more, and he’s traveling less and less because he’s in his 80 I will have a fireside chat with him that for me, I would even pay, yeah, fantastic. It’s like, it’s like, being able to sit down, maybe an interview Trevor klettz or, you know, kind of thing, yeah, but yeah, no, no, I’m looking forward to it. And it might be, you know, it might be the biggest flop in the world, because we’re startup, we’ve never done it, but our heart’s in the right place, and we just got to try.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:22
I don’t think it will be, I don’t think it will be okay, right? This is quickfire questions, so an energy here. We’ve had a lot of energy already. We have, we have no, no. I mean, I mean, I mean, as in short answers,
Malcolm Staves 48:38
can we do that? We’re
Mark McBride-Wright 48:40
gonna try right? What’s the most rewarding part of your job meeting people? What’s one habit you’ve developed that has been key to your success in safety, leadership, networking, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Malcolm Staves 48:59
Wow, actually, it was from my dad, if it’s a long, long time ago, because he set me on the path. But very quickly, if it’s important for your boss, it’s important for you,
Mark McBride-Wright 49:14
that’s a good one. What’s your favorite day to what’s your favorite way to invite what’s your favorite way to unwind after a challenging day.
Malcolm Staves 49:23
That’s easy. So before I actually get in the house, because I don’t want to take all my baggage with me, right, I will park the car 510, minutes away from home, right? And I play unsainted by Slipknot as loud as you can imagine. I sing. I sing, and I play once, twice, three times, until everything goes away. And then when I go home to Karen and the kids when they were younger, I was cool. I don’t know if you know, slipped up, but I’m a big I’m a big heavy metal fan, and I go. To heavy metal festivals with my boys and all the rest of it, and it evacuates.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:06
Oh, I love that word evacuate. Yeah, great, great. That idea of depressurization of the mind, yeah. If you could implement one change across the global safety landscape, what would it be? I
Malcolm Staves 50:23
One change across the global I would bring process safety and occupational health and safety together.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:30
What’s your favorite safety innovation or tool that you’ve seen recently?
Malcolm Staves 50:39
Favorite innovation or tool that I’ve seen recently, I actually it’s, can I do a program? It’s a program that we have in L’Oreal actually, so I’m biased, called safe at work, Safe at Home, and there’s no KPI, no roadmap, no nothing, just a logo and a mindset of exporting what we do, our culture at work, into our homes, into our families, into local environments. So it means, like when you do a training session, at the end, you say, okay, so how would you apply that at home? It means people going home with fire extinguishers and creating discussions.
Speaker 1 51:19
I remember sharing
Mark McBride-Wright 51:20
that, yeah, you got a fire extinguisher into someone else once, didn’t you? Yeah, and they put out a fire.
Malcolm Staves 51:25
Or it means taking employees into schools and making a difference in in townships and slum areas, just to kids, which gives them true sense of purpose. Yeah, that is the is the most incredible. And believe it or not, no initiative, no, no, like I said, No, KPIs or anything, is just wonderful, and it fuels me every day, yeah, seeing the difference you can make. So I know it’s a big program, or the companies do something similar, I’m sure, but it just really, really works, and it creates employees that become safety ambassadors, because the senior the importance of the safety beyond, yeah, beyond that, the gates of L’Oreal. So anyway, that’s not a short one. I’m sorry,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:07
no, well, it’s a beautiful one to conclude on. So if, if people want to get in touch with you, Malcolm, how? How should they do that?
Malcolm Staves 52:16
I’m definitely LinkedIn. I like communicating on LinkedIn. I have a hashtag, which is hashtag, be the hummingbird, connect with me on LinkedIn, and, and, yeah, no, that’s the best way. Brilliant.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:29
Well, we’ll put the link in the transcript in the show not show notes. Really enjoyed chatting with you. Malcolm, thank you so much. Thank you.
Malcolm Staves 52:38
Thank you very much. And just one thing, if I want to say this right at the end, yeah, right. Just for everybody’s information, we didn’t get through any of the questions that were
Mark McBride-Wright 52:47
pre planned at the beginning. No, we didn’t.
Malcolm Staves 52:51
The podcast of the best, the best. That’s the best way to do a podcast. Thank you, Mark.
Speaker 1 52:56
Thank you. Thanks, Malcolm. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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