When it comes to lessons in risk and crisis management, Laurent Barbagli's home life is a rich source of material — he and his wife have 11 children.

“When I finish risk management at Lafarge, I go home and do risk management at home,” he says.

He pays special tribute to his wife who has the bulk of responsibility for organizing the family.

“I am like her broker,” he jokes, saying that it is she, not he, who deserves an award.

“I am committed to my job, but family is key,” he says.

When he is not working, Lafarge S.A.'s group risk and insurance manager and 2015 Business Insurance 2015 Risk Management Honor Roll® honoree enjoys cooking and music, and he has a strong interest in education.

Taking a continuing interest in education gives risk managers leverage to be successful in their jobs, he said.

“Listening to people and communicating is key,” he said.

“We need to understand why insurers can do some things and cannot do others,” for example, he added.

He is a lecturer on the Insurance and Risk Management masters program at Paris Dauphine University with a focus on industrial risk insurance.

Explaining risk management concepts to young people “in an academic way helps me to communicate our model,” he said.

It helps him to question himself and his model — “you challenge yourself,” he said.

When explaining to students the synergies between external audit, internal audit, the insurance function and the risk management function, “it helps me to really understand how that can be out together to be the second line of defense” for the company, he said.

Mr. Barbagli also is a board member of the Paris-based French risk management group Association de Management des Risques et des Assurances de l'Enterprise.

In this role, he serves as a mentor for property damage and business interruption.

“There are lots of different types of risk managers in AMRAE,” said Mr. Barbagli, and the association is working to build a reference guide for all those members doing risk management work in many differing organizations.

“This has helped me to think about what I can do with other functions within Lafarge,” he said.

Mr. Barbagli said that when he started thinking about a career after graduating from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and earning a political science and economic science degree from Paris II University, he realized he did not want to work in an “expertise silo.”

“I wanted to have sufficient expertise to be able to give more perspective on things,” he said.

His career began at Gras Savoye & Cie., the Paris-based brokerage that Willis Group Holdings P.L.C. plans to buy.

From 1991 to 1992, he was head of the medical insurance department for Gras Savoye's Cameroon operations before becoming a captive insurance manager in the brokerage's alternative risks financing department until 1995.

From 1995 to 2000, he was an account executive for CAC 40 companies — the largest listed companies in France — and board member of a Luxembourg-based captive insurer.

Then, after 10 years in broking, Mr. Barbagli said he wanted a challenge that would help him improve his methodology.

So he took on a role outside of the insurance and risk management field to focus on project management.

As a financial consultant and project manager at IBM Business Consulting France from 2001 until 2002, Mr. Barbagli worked on the changeover to the euro from the French franc for a large insurance group.

Then in 2003 he joined Club Mediterranee, the French tour operator, as group risk and insurance manager.

In 2007, he joined Lafarge.

“I wanted to work in leading companies,” Mr. Barbagli said, “because they have leverage and footprint.”

Also, he said, in large companies there is a “diversity of topics” to cover.

“I like to structure things, to simplify things,” he said.