The Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional Episode 4 The Voice of Māori workers

This week Vance Walker and I get together for a korero about Mātauranga Māori or Māori knowledge. We explore some of the nuances of Māori culture in terms of language and behaviours.
Vance gives us an update on his Phd work and where the kia tupato project is at. We discuss the overpowering nature of conventional approaches to health and safety and how other practices which might connect better with some workers don't get much of a look in.
We delve deep into practices that might help health and safety professionals connect better with Māori workers, whether it be through a pepeha, or various communications styles such as speech acts, the words we say or body language and other non verbal cues.
Vance ended with a challenge for us to use the three R's of (1) finding something that resonates, (2) something that can be reconciled and then (3) repeating it when connecting with Māori workers.

So sit back for your weekly  consumption of learning from the Culturally Intelligent Safety Professional as we explore the voice of Māori workers.

Transcript

Greg: 0:04

Welcome to another episode 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. So today I've got another well-known personality in the world of safety. Someone who's challenging norms and really working on integration of Maori cultural aspects into health and safety. He's worked in government, he's worked in the private sector, and he has spent a lot of time as a student. And I believe, currently working on some doctorial research, welcome Vance Walker.

Vance: 1:45

Thanks Greg for the opportunity to have a chat and, I'm also recognising the contributions that you are making in terms of cultural intelligence that remains fairly new to the practice of health and safety from what I can make it. So my name's Vance Walker, I entered health and safety by accident, I just needed a job and they were looking for a health and safety inspector that had, a farming background. So at that stage, quad bikes were being, sorry, quad bike accidents were quite severe. They brought me in and I really enjoyed inspecting and I suppose one of the first points I like to make is because I had an identity as a Māori, and therefore when I spoke to Māori and non Māori, I had my identity sorted out in terms of who I was, and the next step was just to develop my practice. So WorkSafe have been really good to me over the years. They've given me the latitude to develop different things. And part of that has been my practice, which incorporates cultural intelligence off and on. I'm not an expert in cultural intelligence, so I suppose I'm not an expert'cause I just do it. But looking back at some of your work and some of the other literature as part of this torturous PhD I'm doing I do realise that it has its own body of knowledge and you have to uplift that knowledge and then figure out how your practice works. So that's me in a nutshell.

Greg: 3:19

Cultural intelligence really is a professional development sort of process. It's all very well to be culturally intelligent, but actually to get to that point, it's a little bit like leadership really. It's you've gotta work on yourself and and yeah I agree. I tend to find that you use those words, cultural intelligence and people nod, in understanding of the term, but I'm not sure that it's a clear understanding of what is actually being considered. And there's there's quite a bit of discussion as part of this wider podcast series about what it is and fortunately it's one of those things that you can learn and develop as a capability, so yeah, for those interested in that sort of stuff it is something that, can enhance or improve your own personal capabilities around interacting with people really. So many of our listeners will be aware of your Kia Tupato project have you got any updates on where that is at and what is that part of your research or your PhD or is it just a project that you worked on and that's now just out there in the world?

Vance: 4:25

Yeah, so it's out there in the world of New Zealand. So just to go back, so I, I had chats with workers and they, they had a preference for, or predisposition towards cautious behaviour rather than safety. Safety being an ideal that you have to try to attain. Cautious, made more sense to them. And so I turned that into three things. A PhD, which I'm going through now, so central to my PhD is kia tupato. How the use of Kia Tupoto by workers improves their risk perception. And the second part of Kia, Tupato, or my little project so to speak, is the builder business around it. So the updates are the PhDs rolling ahead, very torturous, it's where it's supposed to be. There's a few findings that I didn't realise until you start looking back. One is that trying to get Kia Tupato over the line, or probably cultural intelligence practices. There's two big hurdles. First is hegemony or just a dominating practice wanting to basically dominate the discipline itself. Conventional health and safety kicking everyone else out subconsciously. And the second one is just anxiety by health and safety practitioners who have to not only as you pointed out, know it but have a knowledge of it and then practice it. So that's quite daunting if you are if you're a health and safety practitioner,'cause that means that suddenly you are not the know-all of health and safety. You have to admit to the workers that you don't know everything and then you have to perform to a level that's actually quite high, but more importantly, new. So that puts a lot of health and safety practitioners on the back foot. In terms of updates on Kia Tupato out in the world, it's been confirmed by Meridian Energy who use Harepake as part of their induction. So Kia Tupato has been in front of a thousand workers and it's been some good feedback about it. Again, it just resonates with Blue-collar off-the-tool guys who on-the-tool, guys that caution makes sense to them. And we're also looking at rolling out with a few other companies. Probably put that on the back burner until I get through this PhD. So Kia Tupato does I guess I could describe it as a business proposition to say workers bring good things and bad things to work, but if there's good things that can help their health and safety, such as Kia Tupato, then we should be identifying it and then amplifying it and then accelerating it via practice. The business proposition for employers is that it positions workers to make good, independent decisions outside of those big 500 page health and safety manuals. So it's very simple, but to get to that simplicity, you've gotta jump a few hoops.

Greg: 7:11

It's been very interesting in, becoming aware of this concept of Kia Tupato over the last however many years you've been working on it and just noticing around the country, I've seen it in action. And I think I've told you about all of these examples and I you, whether you had any influence over them or not. I don't know, but I recall a few years ago being at North Head in Auckland and where they had the, they've got the big gun there on top of the, hill, and, there's a hole in the ground where the gun used to be, there was a sign there, Kia Tupato, I guess that was a defence force thing that had been introduced. I remember being at Palmerston North Airport and there was a small child playing on the escalator and his mother was standing at the bottom of the escalator yelling Kia Tupato at him. And I think last week I sent you that video, that YouTube clip which used the phrase, and it was something that had been put together by Hamilton City Council I think it was just using that language and I guess trying to connect better with a particular audience who recognise that caution type approach rather than safety which, I guess a lot of the Māori workers that are out there, I guess yeah, wanting to move into a bit of a discussion about some specifics related to Māori cultural values. And they're all related to communication and just, considering how the safety profession can be more aware of some Māori cultural values. And let's talk about direct or indirect communication. So direct communicators, tell it like it is, get straight to the point, no mucking around versus indirect people who tend to focus on things, harmony and going away and thinking about, what you might've talked about before a decision is made. Where do Māori typically sit and what does it mean in terms of the best way to communicate with Māori workers whether individually or if you're trying to communicate with a team.

Vance: 9:10

Yeah. Given the history and the depth of Māori culture, there's a few as you pointed out, values and those values get practiced. First, one of the first foremost values is whakapapa. So your genealogical ties to whoever are more than just your mate's ties. And those ties obligate you to do different things, including, communicating with other people. If I was a health and safety I am being a health and safety practitioner, but if I wasn't, advanced and I was starting afresh there, there'd be, my practice would resolve around, revolve around. First of all, you front up to Māori workers at say like a six thirty toolbox, and for the first time and obviously, Māori workers have been through the rigmarole of toolboxes like 1 million times, so they've gained what's known as an acquiesence bias, so that's, they know how to play the game. So they'll nod their head when you want them to nod their head, and everyone will go away feeling happy. That's probably the worst communication you want as a practitioner because you really wanna get to the heart of the matter so when they go back to their tasks, you've got a bit of comfort around things. So I guess one of the first things is street cred is quite important. So I encourage guys to do the pepeha, and that doesn't necessarily have to be in Māori can be in English, but that says to those workers, this is who I am and who I'm from, and you'll get a lot of kudos probably not there and then at the time, but as time goes through, your relationship will be improved because they can locate you the individual rather than I'm the health and safety guy. And that has mana in certain circles. And again, you've established this, a point of whakapapa, so to speak, even though you might not be Māori, you still can identify. Oh yeah. Okay. So you're more than this health and safety guy. And then the second thing I would do is just to admit that you don't know a lot about Māori. You wanna learn more and it will take your time and I think that honesty, speaks volumes in terms of a number of Māori values that I won't talk about it today, but being honest again having to overcome that acquiesence bias that's just ingrained in Māori full stop because we've had to do it over 170 years to get on, so we are really savvy, more, more savvy than what people are willing to admit, especially managers, that we do know what levers we have to pull in order to get through the day, which obscures good health and safety for practitioners view. In terms of communication styles, there's a lot of literature around, I think that the communication styles are changing rapidly for Māori because we are looking at third and fourth generation Kura kaupapa graduates, then we're looking at probably seven, eight generations, no, probably six or seven generation of kōhanga reo graduates. So they have been brought up in a Māori education system, so they're, as you may have seen in recent media, you can see the protesters, for instance. They're very articulate and they're unapologetic. So the communication style is, again depending on context. So for health and safety. Practitioner, you're not gonna confront a toolbox with a whole bunch of Māori waving Tino Rangatiratanga flags. So you don't have to worry about the confrontational style, but you do have to think about that, they won't disclose a lot of things to you because they don't know you, and I know trust is one of the core concepts in cultural intelligence, and they're also whakama or shy about, opening up in front of you, which is the same for most workers. So again, you've gotta overcome those barriers and again, I say keep it simple, so a short pepehau, an admission that you don't know everything, but you're willing to learn. And then I suppose in terms of practice, you'd find the supervisor of the crew who might be I dunno, in the forties, fifties, sixties, that's the veteran worker, and take them to the side and say, can you help me get through this? And they'll respect that because at least you've shown respect to them that you acknowledged that they're the matua or the senior of that crew and you wanna learn. So Ako is reciprocal learning, so it's another concept or practice we have and then another one related that is tuakana teina. So older or elder and younger. And what that's about is reciprocating learning as well, but also a duty of care, basically between the senior versus the junior. So it's a pain in the ass'cause I've got a few tuakanas that I have to adhere to and I do that'cause of my cultural values, not because I necessarily think they're the best person to do it. And I'm honest about that to them. They're good to me in terms of that relationship as well. So it's very rich in terms of the communication styles of Māori. It is contextual, the stuff on the marae and the fronts of the marae, the paepae, the whaikōrero, the speeches is quite formalised. There's a lot of cultural intelligence that goes in, I'd call it intra-cultural intelligence, so when you do a whaikōrero, you're really sussing out who the other guys on the other side and how they're related. And again, it comes back to. But to be honest, health and safety practitioners won't see a lot of that what's more important for them is to figure out what are the communication modes, preferences, non-preferences that they confront in the workplaces when they develop their own practice.

Greg: 14:42

Yeah, I mean, just on the pepiha, I remember going to that first Hui with Te Rōpu Maratau o Aotearoa back in, I don't know when that was, 2018, 19 maybe, and there was, I think about 20 odd twenty-five people in the room, we all stood up and, spoke our pepeha and there was another individual in the room who I didn't know of from a bar of soap and as soon as I mentioned, some of my background, we connected afterwards'cause it was similar, we both come from the same part of the country. And and I guess that's part of what that's all about is just. Connection and it might not be blood connection, but it's, you've come from a similar part of the country and therefore there's that connection. That, that goes a long way to creating or starting to create trust and we know that trust crawls into a relationship and runs out, so yeah absolutely good advice there. Just in terms of expressiveness and tone of voice and body language and speed of talking and again, probably differences between a marae setting and a and maybe a workplace setting. How does all of that work in a, typically, in a workplace? What are Maori expressive from a voice perspective we've obviously seen a lot of speaking recently with the Waitangi day celebrations and meetings and the like going on and you see a lot of expressiveness in that environment, is it different in a workplace?

Vance: 16:14

I think yes, it is different. I dunno if I'm best to answer your question'cause I get a filtered view'cause of who I am when I go onto the site. So and so I get a filtered view because I kick off straight away with a Pepeha. So straight away I've taken the moral high ground and then after that I'll start walking the site. On-site Māori workers are very expressive, probably amongst themselves. So if anyone's worked with Scaffies, you'll figure that out, or in the waste industry, you'd figure that out straight away. And that's not particularly a Māori thing that just happens to be a bunch of bros or bro-esses in the same environment, having to get through the stuff that they have to do every day. So they, they form a close comradery. They form their own culture basically to speak. If I'm a practitioner, if anything it's a learning curve, just sitting back and observing and having chats with'em, it does help that you can speak broish. So I've noticed a few health and safety guys that just don't do that for some strange reason they just, I can't figure it out because you can enjoy yourself. And in terms of, raising voices and stuff like that I've never seen it around me, I'm assuming it happens, but that might not be a Māori thing. Again, there is a a hierarchy within the crew, the Matua or the crew chief or crew leader gets a lot more respect if he manaakis his crew. If he doesn't, then he's on the out, he or she's on the out. And then there's the Tuakana Teina concept. To some degree the way health and safety is geared in New Zealand, it doesn't allow for those practices to occur, but once, if you're onto it and you can say, do you guys use a Tuakana teina approach? Māori will say, oh God, he knows about that. And they'll say yes.'cause that's the acquiesence bias. But more importantly, you'll start a conversation and again, it's a learning opportunity and it's free. In terms of just under communication skills styles in workplaces? Yeah. I would say acquiesence bias, whakama being shy and the hierarchy of, I was gonna say controls, but the hierarchy of leadership and the key thing would be manaaki. Those are values or concepts that pan out in communication mode. Manaaki is will mean that they'll be talking more amongst one another if it's used properly and you might not notice it'cause they won't be using Māori words, but they'll be talking about duty of care to one another, just using different language, so to speak. I don't mean English language, just the different form of broish, so to speak. I can't really answer your question'cause of that. I don't really see it and I probably do it too many times.

Greg: 18:46

Look, a couple of things in there and absolutely talking, you talk differently to people in the ivory tower than you do on the frontline, and you've gotta do it, and and it's not about, imitation is not a bad thing. I'm doing some Te Reo stuff at the moment, and. Scotty Morrison's book says Imitate, if you wanna learn how to speak te reo and you've found a fluent Māori person who you know you want to learn from, imitate how they speak. And it helps you learn and you and I had a conversation recently, and I think you, while you may not have used these words, they're very similar to some of the words that in the book about how to learn te reo, and it was engaged with the essence of the language. If you're engaging with the essence of that group of people that you know you are trying to influence, then it's gotta be a good thing. You're going to increase trust, you're gonna increase engagement around those just how you integrate with that group if you are that sort of, and to be honest, health and safety person is sometimes seen as the outsider. You're trying to influence these workers and so if you could be more like them that's a component of being more culturally intelligent.

Vance: 19:57

Yeah yeah and for and reaching a level of comfort both for yourself and the workers, performing their rapport early is probably the best thing you can ever do in health and safety. After that, everything falls into, I'm just thinking more in terms of there's probably five words you need to know in te reo Māori that can get you through as a health and safety practitioner. One would be Kia Ora because that's universal. One would be pakaru broken, so that cuts to the chase. So when I was health and safety inspector, my peers, great peers, good people would come out with long winded sentences about the failing of the PTO Guard as X Y and Z, and I just say to the farmer, that's Pākaru, isn't it? Then he go yeah. So there'd be no arguments. So Kia Ora, Pakaru, Kei te Pehea, or Kai te aha depending on, so how are you? And I'm just trying to think. Pākaru, what else do I use? There's a whole bunch of them. Kei te Marama. Do you understand? Yeah, probably only five, probably six or seven words just to get you through and just to, as you've said, practice, imitate so that's, I know that's known in the literature. Like CI, cultural intelligence is rote learning, so repetitive learning. And keeping it simple. So you've got your little list of terms you can use it to roll out, and then you just expand it into Samoan, Tongan, Malaysian, Filipino, Korean, yeah if anything I could explain cultural intelligence would be a health and safety practitioner waking up in the morning, figuring out where he's gonna go, opens the closet, and he puts on, he, chooses off the rack the cultural intelligent practice that he needs to get through the day. And the more racks you have, the more cultures you can engage.

Greg: 21:51

Cool. Non-verbal actions, and we talk about personal space, we talk about touching people on the shoulder or the back or whatever, body positioning, gestures, facial expressions, eye contact. Eye contact is always an interesting one because it's one that, that is different across many cultures, people say that if you don't look a person in the eye, then that's being rude, but then in some cultures it's showing respect not to look them in the eye. And so is there anything that is used in New Zealand from a non-verbal perspective that might be offensive to Maori?

Vance: 22:31

No, not that I can think of, there's all things, there's a whole bunch of hand signals that are offensive to Māori. Māori are usually the perpetrators. But what I would say is the eye thing is shared between Polynesians, basically you've put your eyes down outta respect for who's talking to you, but you need to balance that out. One is if you don't make eye contact, then your message in terms of a health and safety practitioners is less so you have to make compromises there. So I don't guys look down at me sometimes outta respect what I say you need to be looking at me'cause I'm telling you something. I need to get this across it, and if you explain it in that way, you shouldn't let the cultural preferences get in the way in terms of acute health and safety practice. And I think practitioners need to know that. And the second thing is that sometimes we overemphasize those physical behaviors and actually what they are, so I fold my arms, I fold my arms. So the body language literature says you fold your arms, just putting up a barrier. I fold my arms.'cause I've been taught if you're gonna muck around with your hands, you either put'em in your pocket or fold your arms. So I'll fold my arms. But of course people say he's putting a barrier up. That's, yeah. And I learned that in the military. I'm holding my arms now actually. Whilst the literature gives a lot of value in terms of communication skills and body language we need as health and safety practitioners to balance that into, out, in terms of what we need to achieve in the workplace, yeah. And we can explain that to the workers..

Greg: 24:12

One of the ones, it's not a body language thing, it's probably more a, an expressions thing that, that I've noticed a lot is, and I'm not sure if it's from Māori workers or some Pacifica workers and Filipino workers is been called boss. And I think that's a hierarchical sort of respect thing, isn't it? Just using that, term is something that I've noticed a bit. Is there anything else around, this communication styles across, verbal, nonverbal, body language? Oh, the one thing I wanted to say before you maybe answer that is somebody told me the other day about the East Coast wave we were talking about micro expressions and the east coast wave, the raised eyebrow to say and, you know how I didn't know it was called the East Coast wave to be honest, but is that something that, you see around all the time, don't you? Is that's what it means? Is it? G'day? Hello? How you going? Yeah, so that's a Māori thing. It's probably Ngāti Porou that made it the East Coast wave, but everyone does it. I don't tolerate it myself, so I say kia ora it's just, that's my practice. But from time to time, if there's a, if I have a peer on site, like a crew supervisor, he same age, same line in terms of seniority, I'll go like that.'cause that's all I need to do. But otherwise I'll younger teina workers, because I have to show them respect so going that whilst it's nice and it's not disrespectful from a Tuakana's point. I'll say Kia Ora to them. And I'll tell you what, most workers, when they realize that, they'll say, Kia Ora to me. I don't get what this is. That they might then this comes up and say, come and have talk to me. But that, I've never done that. But you're perfectly right, health and safety practitioners using this isn't a bad thing. It's my practice as a visitor. So we're almost at time and just I guess in wrapping up, have you got any tips or tricks? Just to finish off three or four key things you talked about some words that we can use. Anything else that that we can use to really just integrate more into into some Māori cultures and values and tikanga. I guess it's to, to make both parties feel a little bit more inclusive in each other's worlds.

Vance: 26:28

So I guess if I was a new health and safety practitioner knowledge is more important than understanding because you can't measure understanding. If you can't un if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. If you can't manage it, you can't practice it. I suppose you'd have a real small skill set in terms of understanding. The bigger thing you should be focusing on cultural intelligence is the knowledge so you have any expertise around different things and that's quite interesting for Māori because a lot of Māori think it's all about tīkanga Māori. But actually the big thing is Mātauranga māori, all tīkanga is based on Mātauranga Māori. So I'm more of an expert at Mātauranga māori. Tīkanga māori to me is, I'm hopeless at it. It's a bit like. Tikanga Māori or understandings and cultural intelligence is Titanic. And then there's this Mātauranga Māori iceberg coming along. So you've gotta figure out which one you want to get on first and it takes time, I think. The other things is the three R's. So I tell health and safety practitioners when dealing with Māori and I guess it's other cultures, try to pursue the three R's, find something that resonates with them. So you know your pepeha and then find something that you can reconcile with them, for instance, Kia Tupatu reconciles with risk perception, which reconciles with better risk assessments. And then repeat that yeah. Good practice is about being able to replicate it and improve the standard of it over time and keep it really simple, so if you do those three R's with one or two things and then repeat it you're just gonna get better at, yeah, you will get better. And we all wanna improve in some way, and, improvement in terms of cultural intelligence means better engagement, which means a number of things for the practitioner being more effective, being a better business proposition being more liked and being more accepted and respected on site by workers, which is really what we want.'cause we are there to help them make good decisions.

Greg: 28:30

That's awesome, Vance. Hey, thanks so much. its, been great to catch up as usual and been good to have a bit of a kōrero with you and learn from some of your wisdom and yeah, I guess all the best with the PhD. Get back to the books. And I guess really looking forward to seeing that when it comes out and makes it into the big wide world.

Vance: 28:49

Kia ora tatou

Greg: 28:52

Another wonderful discussion. What did you think? Vance has highlighted a number of things that can help a health and safety professional better engage with Māori. Vance made mention of language differences to describe how Māori feel about safety and actually the word that resonates more is caution or cautious behavior. He talked about honesty and admitting when you don't know a lot about in this case, Māori culture, but are happy to be guided. I think sometimes we walk on eggshells a bit, having that type of conversation for fear of being called racist. But Vance really highlighted that it's more likely to earn some respect. He talked about the simple act of engaging at a human level. A pepeha doesn't have to be in te reo and as Vance said it results in you being seen more than just the health and safety person, you're somebody who's whakapapa, whose genealogy is now known, and there is an ability then for a deeper connection. Vance gave us a few of his favorite Māori words to use in casual conversations with workers. and finished off with a discussion about some aspects of nonverbal communication. how they should or shouldn't be used, what they might mean. And also how hierarchies work within Whanau. He ended with a challenge for us to use the three R's of finding something that resonates, something that can be reconciled and then repeating it when connecting with Māori workers. So 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. Ill add the transcript from this episode to the show notes, and there'll 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 out 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 could 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. I'm joined by Rachel Elliot to talk about her passion for culture and learning. Rachel is a health and safety professional who has worked in a range of industries from oil and gas, transport, waste, and education. She is deeply interested in indigenous cultures and people. Thanks again for tuning in to the culturally intelligence safety professional. ka kitei.