Geoff Mcdonald BSc

Geoff McDonald is the former Global Vice President of HR (Marketing, Communications, and Sustainability) at Unilever.

During his 25 years with Unilever, Geoff’s experience has been truly global working across Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Australasia, and Asia. He inspires and provokes organizations to put purpose and well-being at the center of everything they do. His HR experience has spanned leadership and talent development, organizational change, and capability development, with particular reference to marketing, and business transformation with purpose at its core.

Earlier in his career, he was responsible for graduate recruitment and development, talent, acquisitions, and development across Unilever’s emerging markets. Under his leadership, he developed Unilever’s global talent and leadership center of expertise. More recently he has devoted his time, energy, and effort to leading groundbreaking work where the HR function has played a central role in transforming Unilever’s business model.

Geoff now consults with organizations, helping them define and embed purpose as a driver of growth and profitability. He also consults on how to address the stigma linked to anxiety in the workplace, with a particular emphasis on raising awareness and providing practical strategies as to how one might go about addressing them. He is an active campaigner for breaking the stigma associated with mental health in the corporate world and has participated in a number of BBC programs and campaigns regarding this subject, as well as writing articles for Huffington Post, FT, and HR-related journals.