HSE and Leadership - with Greg Dearsly

Sarah: Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of Athrú Communications Podcast, where we're exploring how you can transform how you communicate across cultures and differences. I'm your host, Sarah Black, and I am up early to record this one because my guest today is based in New Zealand. I am delighted to welcome Greg Dearsly to the podcast.

Greg works to help organizations build valued relationships with their employees through health and safety, due diligence, worker engagement, and continual improvement. He has decades of experience in health and safety, and among his many qualifications, he has a master's in advanced leadership practices.

And that's where he first discovered cultural intelligence. His master's dissertation explored how cultural intelligence. It can be a critical capability for safety professionals in building interpersonal trust, which is one of the many reasons that I wanted to chat with him on the podcast, because Greg talks a lot about trust, cultural intelligence and communications, which are all core to what we do.

y, Greg is also going to be a: 2025

Greg: Hi, Sarah. Awesome to be here. It's our first thing in the morning for you. And I'm just going to head off for dinner shortly. Opposite ends of the globe, but we can still connect and have a great chat.

Sarah: Yeah, no, thank you for making the time. I really appreciate it. Greg, I'm going to start with a big question, but I'm really interested in how cultural intelligence, communications and health and safety come together in your mind, like what's the connection and why is it so important?

Greg: Look, safety people, and I probably make a whole lot of broad generalizations as I talk, but safety people are historically known as a group that tell people what to do. Now, so firstly, we've got to get out of that habit and learn more, and, we were talking before about listening that's something that, that safety people probably need to learn to do better at is listening, but, we spend a lot of time giving people information, whether that's written, verbal and I just think in today's diverse workplaces, which we've got pretty much everywhere in the world, maybe a couple of exceptions where it is a bit of a monocultural type environment, but talking, I take it from a New Zealand perspective, or Europe, Pākehā perspective talking.

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So, every workplace is going to have some aspect of difference. And I guess the other thing I think about in terms of communication, I talk about people being born overseas, but I talk and think more about Not just ethnicity, how are we communicating safety information to the neurodiverse community?

Dyslexia, ADHD, autism, those sorts of things, where certain communication methods just don't work for that, that, that community or people with that type of cognitive brain wiring. And I think about the screeds and screeds of paper that safety professionals and organizations create in the name of safety.

And I'm not sure about in the UK, but certainly here there's usually a writer on the bottom that says, ‘please sign that you've read and understood this document.’ And we go and give it to the person that's got dyslexia or struggles to read. And. It might be a neurodiverse thing, but equally, it might be somebody who's recently migrated to the country and struggles with a bit of English.

So yeah, I think getting to understand how to better communicate with people that are different is really the thing that we need to get better at. I'll use the term, and I hate the term, and I'm trying to tell people to stop using the term soft skills. It's a soft skill, but actually it's more than that.

It's a power skill or an essential skill that we need to add into our toolbox along with our technical skills as safety professionals. And actually, when I think about it, learning these power skills And being able to do them effectively is probably more difficult than the technical skills that, we go to university or polytech to learn about, or even from an experience perspective, being in a workplace for a long time and learning about different aspects of work the so called soft skills I think are more difficult for most people to get their heads around.

Sarah: I love that power skill idea. That's lovely. One of the things that I was really struck by reading about your background and your approach to work is how much you talk about trust. And I wanted to ask you about how you like, what's the connection between cultural intelligence and trust building for you? How do those two things sit together?

Greg: So again, going back to the bit about the role of the safety professional, and safety professionals tend to be the role in an organization that touch everybody in the hierarchy, right? We've got to look after the safety of the office people and the senior leadership team.

And we've got to look after the safety of the people that are doing the real work and the risky work. And so, we spend a lot of time talking to people. And I suppose trying to influence people around how work might be done, notwithstanding the bit that we also want to listen, but influence is a big piece of the puzzle, right?

It's one of the skills that a safety professional needs to have. And so, I think having that ability to influence. Only works if you've got the trust of the other person that you're engaging with, or it might not be on an individual perspective, it could be on a small group or a larger group.

But if people trust the safety professional that the message they're delivering is in their best interests, I guess answering the what's in it for me question and that I've shown some trust and all of those things that build trust about saying what you, or doing what you say you're going to do not letting people down and all of those things that build trust.

If we can harness that as safety professionals, it just makes our ability to influence.

Sarah: Yeah, it's so interesting to me to listen to this and hear you talk about safety professionals. And I think for a lot of what you're saying, you could substitute communications professionals. Because the same thing, the trust, the building and I think one of the things that I'm hearing is that if we show up in a way that's culturally intelligent, it's easier for us to build trust potentially because we've built connection. Does that, is that a fair kind of summary?

Greg: Yeah, look, absolutely. And it's just, just about, and you've, again, you said it before we started recording, you talked about listening and curiosity, and we hear a lot of this in some of the indigenous cultures, certainly around this part of the world before you start down the path of engaging with a group of people on a work project. Many of the indigenous cultures, if not all of them, will spend a little bit of time trying to get to know one another before we actually start talking about work. And whereas, maybe European culture or Anglo culture is more about just getting straight into it and straight onto, whatever the project might be.

And gee, I reckon there's just so much to be said for just sitting down and shooting the breeze for 10 minutes before, you start. I, I heard an interview this morning, actually. And I've posted about, not about the interview, but about the subject that the person was being interviewed about.

And it was a woman from one of the Pacific Islands. And she, it was her first time on live TV. And she started by almost interrupting the interviewer and gave a bit of an introduction about her family history and where she was from and a bit about her culture. And I haven't really heard that on, certainly not on live TV before.

Certainly, Māori culture here the introduction of your family history and some of your ancestry and some of your connections. This is normal a normal process to go through for Māori culture and yeah, it was just, it was quite cool to hear that on live TV before they got into the discussion that they were going to be talking about.

Yeah, I think that absolutely there's benefit in just that curiosity and getting to understand. Just little things about people's culture because it then helps you or might help you find little nuggets to better understand how and why people make decisions.

Sarah: That's important from a safety perspective, right?

Greg: Yeah. Yeah. And to me, any kind of change program, because I suppose with safety, you're trying to shift people from one behaviour to another, away from the risk and into the better being and the healthier choices.

Sarah: Yeah. And whatever that looks like in whatever your workplace is, what we talked a little bit before we came on air about, how you discovered cultural intelligence and, I think it's obvious that you have a great passion for it if you follow, if you podcast or follow what he does on LinkedIn. And I'm intrigued to know what sparked it? What was the thing that made you go, “Oh, this is worth pursuing.”

Greg: So I, I first was introduced to it during a master's program or the master's in leadership that you mentioned right at the beginning and it just happened to be one of the subjects. It was intermingled with sustainability ethics and indigenous leadership, I think was the title of the sort of the workshop we were doing. And we had a couple of people come in and present.

Certainly, there was two different subjects there, indigenous leadership and cultural intelligence. We went and spent a day on a marae and went through some of the normal, Cultural Māori practices that you would do in such a setting and yeah, Shireen Chua was the guest speaker or the lecturer on the cultural intelligence and a few of us actually on that course really clicked with that subject and we were Yeah just when we were working through the analysis of the whole course and trying to drill down into what our thesis might be about that was the one course that had sparked interest from a leadership perspective.

And you talk about you could replace safety professionals with communication professionals. Actually, what I think you can do is replace both of those with leadership. And I would say it's not about it's not about leaders with a title. Or as I sometimes say, it's not about the leaders with the flash title and the shiny shoes.

It's about the people that show moments of leaderly behaviours. And yes, I've gone down a niche of focusing on the safety sector, but quite frankly, it could be, almost everybody could benefit from being more culturally intelligent. Anyway, that's maybe off track from the question but getting back to the how and why, it just, I just connected It is a, as a great leadership skill.

The Masters we'd done some work around emotional intelligence. And if we think about some of the research that David Livermore from the CQ Center might talk about, cultural intelligence fills a bit of a gap left by emotional intelligence. And yeah, it was just, I think it was just connecting leadership, cultural intelligence, safety, and that influencing piece, because influencing is a key skill for those that work in the safety space.

Sarah: Yeah. No, it's fascinating. And I think I've heard you talk in the past about like the real implications of how cultural differences can impact like safety outcomes.

Like there's a very real impact of your work in the safety sense, very perhaps a broader impact in terms of leadership, but there can be a very real and immediate almost life and death impact of not grasping cultural differences in the safety sense.

Greg: Yeah, and actually it's a communication thing mainly.

And again, I talk about more than just ethnicity. And I seem to have found another area of focus which is around this sort of neurodiversity space and if we're not communicating effectively for people, either that might have that different cognitive brain wiring or are different from an ethnic perspective.

And a colleague of mine who works in the dairy farming sector did some research, which was quite, again, quite niche. It was targeted at Filipino workers in the dairy sector in a particular part of the South Island of New Zealand. And during the research that she was doing, she found out a whole bunch of stuff about Filipino culture.

One of which was this word that exists in Filipino culture, which is Bahalanar. And Bahalanar effectively means but for the grace of God, everything will be okay. If I get hurt at work, it'll all be okay. And then you measure that cultural value, cultural norm. against our Western Anglo expectation, safety, compliance, follow the rules, do it the right way, all of that sort of stuff.

You really now have to come down, that's where the cultural intelligence piece comes in. How do you now engage with somebody who's got that deep rooted cultural value? Of, putting faith in a deity or whatever, and try and get them to understand what the risks might be that they need to be aware of.

And look, a lot of migrants come to New Zealand for the purposes of sending money home to their families, and I guess maybe that's the area to focus on, is if you get paid at work. Your family will suffer because you can't send money home, et cetera, et cetera. And we've had some shocking incidents in relation to migrant workers being hurt.

And in fact, the last, most recent one, there was I think three fatalities in a roading, driving situation. where they could have done nothing about it. A truck coming the other way on the motorway lost a wheel, it carried across the motorway and just ploughed straight into them.

And these young fellas were here picking apples for, you know, for the season. And so yeah, it's, it has got real implications because I think also a lot of the work that migrants do, a lot of the work that indigenous cultures do. Is the high-risk staff, it's the forestry, it's the farming, it's the construction, it's construction, it's the manufacturing and that's where I think not too dissimilar from your part of the world, those are the industries that that suffer the most in terms of workplace fatalities.

Sarah: Yeah. Greg, thank you. I could talk to you about this all day, but we're going to try and restrain ourselves and keep it short. I asked, I'm asking everybody for a book, a podcast, a video, some kind of recommendation that they think would be useful for listeners to, to grow their cultural intelligence. What have you got for us?

Greg: So I, one of the first leadership books that I looked into and read is a book called Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein. And really that was about, it's probably not about cultural intelligence, although there is an aspect of cultural intelligence in there.

It was about trying to help leaders. better understand how to talk to people who are different from them, or the people that do the work for them. Different cultures, leadership versus, and again, another term I don't particularly like, but the frontline. And so it was about understanding how they can better engage with the people that work for them.

And equally, it's the other way, right? It's, I guess there's a, there's an aspect of maybe fear or trepidation from the frontline. When somebody in a business attire turns up and wants to talk. Now we talked about it during COVID. I think one of the best things a leader can do. is to be vulnerable and show vulnerability because we, our businesses run around and say, “Oh, it's okay to be vulnerable.”

It's a safe space, et cetera. But unless the leader's going to do that as well, nobody else will. And so just because you're the chief executive on a high salary with a flash car and a big house doesn't mean that COVID didn't knock you around a little bit not from a health perspective, but from a or, whatever.

Perspective. And so just showing a little bit of vulnerability showing that curiosity that we've talked about. A great phrase that I liked from this sort of space is ask more questions than you give answers. Ask questions that you don't already know the answer to.

Sarah: Yes. Yeah. Love that. That's a great piece of advice, and actually that is, quite often when I think about cultural intelligence, that division between, the senior leadership and people on the shop floor, deskless workers is the phrase that we hear a lot here in the UK, the desk based and the deskless is a huge cultural divide.

So being able to adapt across that is, is key to it. I think contemporary cultural leadership and leadership. Yep. Greg, thank you. It's been fascinating. Very much appreciate it. We'll pop a link to that book and we'll also pop a link to Greg's podcast and all the ways that you can get in touch with him and follow him to keep track of what he's up to, particularly as he moves into CQ Fellowship next year.

Yeah, looking forward to that back. Thank you.

Greg: Excellent. Thanks Sarah.