The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional Episode 2 Uncertainty

For those of you who work in the safety sector in New Zealand, my guest today needs no introduction, many of us will have learnt from him in a university setting or on a webinar or through something insightful he has posted on social media. Chris Peace is a risk management expert, OSH Lecturer at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, and recipient of the 2023 Safeguard Lifetime Achievement Award.  

In this week’s episode Chris Peace explores uncertainty, although maybe not in the same context as he normally uses this word in respect of his definition around risk, or maybe it is. If your objective is to successfully engage with another person and this person is from a different culture you can be thrown into a situation of uncertainty, which could cause you to not achieve that objective.

We discuss treating people in a way that meets their cultural needs, sometimes we all make mistakes and for the culturally intelligent leader the last thing we want to do is cause offence. Chris opens up about some of his faux pas and equally discusses situations where he has recognised the need to change the way he interacts with the audience because he has identified, through visual cues, some aspect of difference.

We cover off on planning how to best engage with international students to join his cohort, how he communicates and mentors’ students through the Masters programme and discusses some success stories along the way.

For the health and safety professional there are lessons in this chat, you might not be teaching in a University, but you could be leading a toolbox meeting, committee meeting or even having a one-on-one discussion with someone who is different from you. Consider what you need to do to eliminate uncertainty from this type of scenario.

Transcript

Greg: 0:01

Welcome to episode two of the culturally intelligent safety professional. A podcast aimed at providing a platform where by safety professionals can develop a pathway to enhance their cultural intelligence capability, which will in turn, help them function more effectively when working in a multicultural situation. I'm Greg, Dearsly your host, and I have a range of guests lined up to talk to this year. We have people with experiences across leadership, psychology, health and safety, education and of course cultural intelligence. All our guests come from a wide range of different backgrounds across the diversity spectrum, including from different organizational contexts. In this podcast you'll hear stories aimed at helping you, the listener enhance your cultural intelligence. Youll gain an understanding of how you can create trust when working in diverse environments and quite frankly, that's all the time, no matter how homogenous the place you work at might be it is still full of diversity. People with different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs, all built on their figured world. For those of you that work in the safety sector in New Zealand, my guest today needs no introduction. Many of us will have learnt from him in a university setting or on a webinar or through something insightful that he's posted on social media. Chris Peace is a risk management expert, an OSH lecturer Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington and recipient of the 2023 Safeguard lifetime Achievement Award. Welcome Chris, and thank you for putting some time aside to have a chat.

Chris: 1:43

Hi there, Greg thank you for the introduction. Yeah, I mean in terms of where I am now this is. Goodness, it's year five of being an academic a, position occasionally I thought it would be good to be, but I'm not, I never thought I'd get here, especially having turned seventy-four the last year. So here I am teaching at postgraduate level and this year we have definitely got a number of international students and we also have a fair number of domestic students and some of whom might end up listening to this. There's a great deal of thinking has to go into how am I going to be doing the teaching this year, which will be a little bit different, but not hugely different from last year. And also drawing on some of my life experiences in put in plain English, making cock ups in how I interacted with people, as well as noticing how other cultures work, how other cultures do things. So maybe that's today.

Greg: 2:49

Yeah, absolutely. And yes, we're here to talk about and learn about those experiences that people have had around cultural intelligence and I guess from your perspective or the perspective of this episode it's about learning, it's about education and I don't know, maybe we start with a couple of your worldly experiences let's say, when you've interacted around the world with people and learnt something about behaviour or trying to extract your foot from wherever to get yourself out of a sticky situation.

Chris: 3:21

You should never be afraid to admit where you've got it wrong and sometimes actually caused unintended caused offense. And one that I remember with some anxiety or embarrassment. I was working in Bristol for Bristol city council and there was a problem that I had to go and investigate. Somebody had made a complaint, I arrived. Went to the address and nobody was home. And when I came out from the business where I'd hoped to talk to the person, there was somebody standing nearby and he said, oh no, he is not here. He's gone away. And it wasn't perfect English, but that was okay. I said, oh any idea when he'll be back or, yeah. Later today. Later today. I said, okay. Thank you. And just for the record, do you mind if I have your name, please? Patel. My name is Patel. Oh, thank you. Mr. Patel. And what's your Christian name? And there was an awful silence and he stared quite horribly at me and said, I am Muslim. I am not Christian. And that's that. Acute embarrassment for me and cause of anger on his part obviously has stuck for forty-something years. And so that had me thinking about other cultures, how you get named, how you live with people or not as the case and just endless things. The difference between but most of the listeners will probably be in New Zealand, I'm guessing. But if you are a white Pākehā male, how am I different from the people I have to interact with? So the second one, which was a bit more sensitive. I'd been asked to go to Malaysia, to Kuala Lumpur to run a training course, and on day one, people were coming into the room and the organizers had set things up so that there were, I think it was four round tables in the room and some people drifted in. They'd done their registration and the women. All began to congregate around one table and the men around another table, but the men outnumbered the women, and so two of the tables were full of men, and some of them knew each other. The women were dressed differently from each other, some were dressed with a hijab and some in distinctly western clothes, but nothing showy and nothing above the knee, if I can put it that way, in terms of dresses. And I clicked, I was in a Muslim society and I had to respect, I couldn't do what I would usually do on a training course and say look, can we mix people up so we can get the benefits of different experiences they had chosen where they would feel comfortable. And so I started running the course and what I usually do is ask people for their feedback face to face. So I might say Greg, how do you feel about that, please? And there was one lady on the female table who just shook her head and said no, she wouldn't talk. And it was whether it was her personal comfort zone or whether religion or whatever. The other notable thing, of course, was that the women who were dressed in traditional style would not shake hands, that was not acceptable, they should not touch a man. The men on the other hand, were really gung-ho, great guys, and just think of any training course you've been on here in New Zealand where you've got blokes who can talk to each other and egg each other on and talk about their experiences. That was the first time I'd seen that so clearly with women in a Muslim society, now that I'm an academic, there've been three occasions when I've sat on the stage on graduation day and watched all of the people coming across the stage, shaking hands, being given their certificates, and then more hand shaking as they go off. Occasionally, some women come across the stage, usually dressed in a particular style that says they are Muslim, and I'm only mentioning Muslim people, women particularly because this has been such an obvious learning point for me, and whoever is going to be giving them their award, their certificate, will have twigged already and as they come across the stage, each bows to the other it's quite synchronized, so there's no attempt to shake hands, it's nodding and a welcome and congratulations and very careful handing over of a certificate so there's no touching. We have a fair number of international students at Victoria University, and so it is important to learn who is willing to interact with you in a way that our domestic students would and who won't. And it isn't true for them all, but you just have to, it's almost milliseconds before, do I need to shake hands because this is somebody knew that I'm going to meet and milliseconds before, no, don't attempt to shake hands or however they want to greet you. So going with their style, their approach is the important thing, take their lead. And that requires quite a bit of Subtle preparation before going into a meeting and perhaps a third example that is this year, right now, something that one of my colleagues and I are working on, because we know we've got some international students and it isn't quite clear to me at least yet where in the world they've come from. I know one or two are from India, and I know some may not be from India, but they're from other countries. We are required for the Masters in workplace health and safety to include legislation, court cases, where does this all come from and what's of significance to the students? So initially I was designing the two papers that I teach to obviously include Health and Safety at Work Act, and everybody knows what the Health and Safety at Work Act is and almost certainly will know how to get a free of charge, downloadable copy. When it comes to talking about district court decisions. Then I have heard of some, but I can help them to actually have copies of what judges wrote. But this year. I've made the assumption that is not true for some of the international students. And so the other person I'm working with is the law librarian, and between us, we're going to do a 15 or 20 minute recorded session where she will put up a PowerPoint slideshow where does law come from in New Zealand and what's the structure of the courts and so on. And then she and I will work through three examples to illustrate the important bits for students doing the Masters in workplace health and safety. Some of them, some of our students might only do the postgraduate certificate, but it doesn't matter, they will have the opportunity to watch this if they don't know if even for domestic students. So that's an awful lot of talking from me about patient.

Greg: 11:41

Yeah, that's interesting. So a couple of your points there one of the things that forms part of the cultural intelligence development, I suppose if you are in interested in, understanding your own cultural intelligence is putting yourself or understanding where you sit on various cultural values and, we know the key ones that were part of things like Hofstede's work in terms of individualism and collectivism and those sorts of things, and while that, you can go through the process and based on the questions that you answer, it'll put you somewhere on a spectrum that says you're either more an individualistic or collective end of the scale, while that sort of sounds stereotypical it's not intended to be. And I guess to your point, you've gotta start somewhere, you've got to understand that a percentage of people, or maybe even the majority of people from a certain country are likely to be collective take a collectivist view of things. It doesn't mean everybody, certainly doesn't mean everybody is going to be like that and I think you pointed that out in some of your descriptions of some of the people in the class, some were wearing clothing that you might associate with people from certain parts of the world and others maybe weren't. So I think that's important to remember that the cultural values that we measure people against is a starting point so that you've actually got somewhere to start a conversation or start some learning to say this person might be. But I need to inquire more into that and understand what their situation could be. And as I say, it might be the majority, but it's certainly not going to be all of them, and I think doing the, your piece with the legislation is in some ways showing some cultural intelligence from the university and from yourself and your colleague to thinking in advance about what you might have to do to cater for the needs of international students and pointing them in that direction of understanding some of the key concepts behind New Zealand legislation. While you were talking you talked about people coming up on the stage and, the certificate being handed over. We see this a lot with Asian cultures when we swap business cards. My observation is that many people from that part of the world is again, very deliberate with how they swap business cards. They will hold it with two hands and pass it to you and as I understand it that's, they're proud of their job and the title that they have. And many people in New Zealand will just grab it off them and chuck it in their top pocket and say, yeah, good on you, mate.

Chris: 14:23

You take it with, take it from somebody else two handed and not ostentatiously, but obviously you pause and read it. Ah, you are from yes and if they're a visitor to New Zealand oh an obvious question is how long have you been here? How long are you staying? That is a conversation opener. The normal Western habit of thanks and sticking it in pocket, that's, ooh, maybe not insulting because they've probably experienced that from somebody else, but at least it's going to make them think, oh this person's a bit brash or naff. Now, so yeah it's being sensitive to other people's cultures, definitely. But if I, Greg, we haven't talked about this before, but I arrived here in 1980 and, when I arrived shortly after, there was a hullabaloo going on because of the Springbox tour. And I'd done a bit of traveling around the country and the Springbox were coming and then they were here and there was all of the ruckus that went on with the different games. And somewhere at that time I was out to dinner with some people, some people I'd made friends with and they said, oh, come. And the inevitable question was asked. How long have you been here now, Chris? It's just about a year, and what do you think of it so far? And so I'd talk a little bit about it. What don't you like? And I made a comment about how Maori people were being treated at that time, and some of those things that I talked about then were, have been talked about at the moment. Here we are. It's February, 2024 and some of those same issues have been surfaced again. And something of how I commented which I won't repeat to you, but it caused great consternation on the part of a few people who'd been born and raised here. I wasn't still something of an outsider, an immigrant. And there's an interesting label to stick on yourself. I was an immigrant having the temerity to comment on New Zealand culture. I think I've been here long enough to no longer be called an immigrant and truly settled. Over to you.

Greg: 16:57

Absolutely. Look that whole situation is not one easy resolved, I don't think. And obviously it's something that's current let's say with what's going on with elections and coalition deals and all sorts of things going on, and it's, I think from outside of New Zealand, our approach to indigenous cultures is seen positively, but I think certainly from many inside New Zealand we know that there are significant gaps in what we're doing in that respect. All of

Chris: 17:31

these things that I've touched on that they really keep looping back to, before you open your mouth or put your hand forward, think about the people you are interacting with or going to interact with, and when it comes to people I meet who, and this is that they work in health and safety in XYZ. I just make an assumption that because they work in health and safety, they have some knowledge may be very good knowledge. But one assumption that I think is correct is they will have different experiences to my experiences and their experiences may well be as valid as mine or even more so for example somebody who works in mining, I have no experience of coal mining, gold mining or anything else mining other than open cast mining in the uk, it's different. So I listened with interest to what other people have to tell me. And there was one occasion in that context where a family friend who was a mine manager of an open cast mine said since you're here, do you want a tour of this mine? Yes, please. Opportunities like that don't turn up very often and I had a really interesting trip and halfway through the tour, the assumption that was hovering in the back of my mind was this is producing jobs for the local community and I bet the blokes who work here are very happy and then the assumption was shot to pieces because I realized almost all of the voices I'd been listening to on the radio and everybody was on the radio at the same time, almost all of them were women. And the person who was showing me around was the female mine manager, and she explained the women locally were looking for jobs and they were better at driving these enormous machines than some of the men who were looking for jobs. And you have the different experiences that gradually make you see, yes, we're all equal. Yes, we should all treat each other with respect. But some people need to be treated with respect that meets their cultural needs and everything that goes with their own life experience.

Greg: 20:07

absolutely, and one of the concepts around cultural intelligence and certainly the path that I'm heading down is a lot of people say the words cultural intelligence and I think immediately most people go towards ethnicity as the sort of the discussion point, but actually the same concepts that we use to better understand different cultural needs can be applied across all aspects of diversity and in fact all aspects of different organisational cultures. And when I say that, an organisation is going to have a culture, there'll also be subcultures within that organisation, the management team will have a subculture, the sales team, the mechanics, the truck drivers, the, customer services team. And then of course we've got the other subcultures that come up occasionally, safety culture and others. And so I guess I'm thinking about it in terms of that broad spectrum of cultural intelligence and it's not just about ethnicity and you've mentioned a couple of points that sort of talk to that. I guess one of the things I wanted to just have a quick comment from you or a quick story if you've got one, and we've talked about this a little bit and you've said that you've got a multitude of international students and as an educator, as somebody who's there to deliver information and track progress and help people along the way with their education. When you've got somebody who's not English is not a first language. What are some tips and tricks that you've got to make sure that they understand and that you are communicating to the best of your ability to make sure they do understand?

Chris: 21:51

Yeah, sometimes this is really difficult. I start with the premise that if i could write their language and speak their language as well as they can speak and write English, even if it's difficult to understand them. If I could perform in their language as well as they do in mine, then I'd be pretty proud of myself. So that's a good starting point, but that doesn't necessarily get people pass grades or even A plus grades here in the university. So I've tried to structure the assignments for the papers that I teach so that there's an easy one at the beginning. It's not difficult to get 10 out of 10 for it. Just put a bit of work in and if I can spot that somebody has written English that is not necessarily eloquent given it's a PowerPoint slideshow. You can't write something that is really good English in a slideshow. But there are markers, there are indicators. The second assignment, 500 words is worth 10%, and if that's where it really shows that they're not very good at writing English, I try and have a quiet conversation with them, point them in the direction of student learning. And my colleagues in student learning provide a lot of help with how to write better English in an assignment. I can't give people good marks for something that isn't well-constructed. So I always tried to give constructive criticism of, you could have written this better if you had structured it like this and then written it, including this material or something else. Ultimately, it comes down to how much somebody is willing to learn. And I remember having a couple of students early on in 2020 when I'd started here. One of them in particular was not very good at writing English and at the risk of being misunderstood, by the time I'd finished with him at the end of the year, he'd done both of the papers I teach there'd been a tremendous improvement in how he could write. And yes, he had gone to student learning, and yes, he'd had some help from them and he'd paid attention to my constructive criticisms. He felt better about himself and actually not necessarily part of cultural intelligence, but he also told me the story at the end of the year that his 8-year-old son was full of admiration and enthusiasm for his father who was working his tail off studying at university. And now dad had become a role model. In helping somebody to improve their capabilities by improving how they write and communicate was having a, I don't know whether that kid will ever go to university himself, but it certainly will have influenced him to try harder at school and that, that might me feel quite good.

Greg: 25:11

And interesting point and something I'll just touch on and maybe as a discussion for another day, and I'm certainly, I have a couple of guests in the pipeline to talk to on this subject. You're talking about an inability or some improvement needed in how people who are English as a second language and how well they present written information. What about, what has the university got in place in terms of people that might be dyslexic? And have the same types of issues in terms of written communication.

Chris: 25:44

Oh. I'm very pleased you asked the question in a nutshell, my colleagues in student learning I went and asked them because this question came up a few months ago. I went and asked them what they do and I got some really fabulous answers from them. Yes, we can help people one-on-one, but more importantly we help them with some software, which I guess it's audio dictation software. And we help them in an any number of ways so that their inability to write is not going to mean they can't complete a paper or a degree, and they talked about some people who are dyslexic, were dyslexic, obviously there's don't change, but they were dyslexic when they went through their degree, and they did very well. And then after finishing their degree, we, colleagues in student learning heard that they were doing well in their jobs. They'd carried on using the software, the computer systems the tools and techniques that they'd been given no charge here, and they were using them in their job, and that meant they were doing well. So it was a sort of win-win situation, yes we got somebody through with a degree and yes, they were doing well as a result in their career.

Greg: 27:11

And the technology that's available for that type of, situation is pretty good. I guess one final point to maybe get a comment on you from you in terms of cultural intelligence as a capability, and it is a capability and it's built on research linked to intelligence, where do you think that fits? Or do you think it fits into the safety curriculum somewhere? A lot of your work, is based on technical skills of understanding legislation and risk management and various other things. I guess cultural intelligence fits into that other side of essential skills is what I like to term them as, do you think there's a place for that in, in the learning of safety professionals?

Chris: 27:55

Yeah, definitely. Because of the way things are set up, for example, here at Vic, the Master's Programme is accredited by IOSH in the uk. So the papers, the health and safety papers that we teach are required to meet IOSH requirements. Double use of the word required. There is not much scope to go beyond, but I wish there were, and I wish that and this for me is something of an issue that goes right back to my own undergraduate days. That we should, here now we should be teaching how to interact with people better. Making assumptions is foolish. There are quiet, subtle ways of starting to engage like I talked about at the beginning. And how you avoid further assumptions. I'm thinking of one particular job that I did where I was telling a chief executive what I thought was the, a good technical answer to the question he had posed, and then he turned around and said, but actually I know you dislike the five-by-five consequence likelihood matrix, that's obvious, but it's actually a very good communication tool with some of the people who are not very literate and it was another one of those learning experiences for me. Yeah, we should be teaching cunning little ways of learning about other people and how to better thinking health and safety at work Act terms, how to engage and engage with people as equals and not knock them because they don't know as much as you do. Or at least that's what you think is the case. So yeah, it should form part of the syllabus, but at the moment it doesn't form very much. Although my colleagues might say no we talk about ethics and professional practice, and so perhaps I need to go and talk to them about how much they bring cultural intelligence in there.

Greg: 30:16

What a wonderful way to end the chat, Chris, thanks so much. It's been great hearing about some of your experiences. Good to catch up again as always and hearing some of your wisdom and insights so just thanks for your time and all the best for the new year and I know you've got lots on appreciate you putting some time aside to have a chat. My pleasure,

Chris: 30:36

Greg. Thank you for the invitation.

Greg: 30:39

What'd you think of that? Chris has so much experience and so many stories to tell. If I was to highlight a couple of takeaways from our conversation, it is, this. We all make mistakes. Being adaptable when you're in a culturally diverse setting is a key component of becoming culturally intelligent. It means you can identify when your mental models have been challenged, and something that you thought was part of someone's culture turns out to be different. How do you acknowledge your mistake to ensure that you don't cause offence? Planning before you going into a multicultural situation is key. Chris talked about a range of situations where planning would have meant things flowed a little smoother. His example of preparing to explain to international students the details of New Zealand sleep legislative framework. is an example of planning ahead. We talked a bit about behaviors. Do I bow, shake hands, kiss or hug. How do I receive a business card from a visitor from a different country? Getting to know some of these nonverbal actions is important when working in a multicultural setting. We've come to the end of this episode. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you found something valuable that you can take away that might enhance aspects of your own cultural intelligence. I'll add the transcript from this episode to the show notes, and there will be some other resources available as well. If you'd like to talk about cultural intelligence, get in touch with me via LinkedIn. I'm posting content regularly, so keep an eye on your feed and comment if you see something that resonates. If we aren't connected. Send me an invite. If you want to hear more about CQ. You can follow and subscribe to this podcast. I'd really appreciate it, if you did that, and keep an eye out for the next episode. Next week's guest is a special one. I'm joined by Alys Barr to talk about neurodiversity. Alys is a communications connoisseur, who's worked with organizations across the world in a range of industries, including travel, retail, education, and most recently financial services. I'm really looking forward to this one. Until then, thanks again for tuning in. Ka kitei