The first steps to understanding and applying Māori culture in your organisation
We know that starting the process of understanding and applying Te Ao Māori and Māori culture within your organisation can be daunting. For many, it’s difficult to know where to begin. The Maurea team are here to support you through the process – helping you to build not just cultural competency, but cultural intelligence.
To make things a little simpler, we’ve mapped out a Māori culture journey, which is designed to start your pathway forward.
“Building cultural competency will enable us to create fair, diverse and inclusive workplaces and reflect the diverse communities we serve. It will also enable the public service to engage meaningfully, and to design and deliver services that meet the needs of all New Zealanders, now and into the future.”
– Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission: Papa Pounamu, Driving Diversity and Inclusion Across the Public Service.
Step 1: Measurement
Before you can develop your cultural competency, it’s important to know where your knowledge and competency sits today. We’ve developed a Māori cultural competency audit tool in partnership with Ask Your Team. Designed to measure the progress of your organisation’s Māori cultural capability, rather than just te reo Māori language proficiency, Te ara ki tua measures confidence across the six core competencies defined by the Māori Crown Relations Capability Framework.
Step 2: Understanding
The next step is to build a greater awareness and understanding of Te Ao Māori and Māori culture. Our training programme, Te Kaa, is designed to quickly build an understanding of the Māori world view and, encourages graduates to consider how they can start to embed Māori thinking and ways of being into their work environment and their life in general.
Step 3: Taking Action
Once you have an understanding of Te Ao Māori and Māori culture, the most important next step is to actually apply it, within your organisation. Maurea’s Consulting services are designed to help you implement your new found knowledge within your business and to make the most of the opportunities this presents. We can support you with strategy development, advisory services and much more. Furthermore, our consultants can support your journey through each of the remaining steps.
Step 4: Māori Responsiveness
Māori responsiveness and responsibility defines the step where inequity and inequality can be addressed. There is a significant shift here in the way the business thinks about actions in relation to Māori and Māori culture. In much the same way as Corporate Social Responsibility has seen businesses shift from doing good because they have to, to doing good because they want to, Māori Responsibility represents a stage in organisation decision making and operations, where decisions are made because they’re simply the right thing to do.
Step 5: Bi-Culturalism
As organisations develop a greater awareness of the right thing to do in a Māori cultural context, the obvious next stage is to create a truly bi-cultural environment. This type of environment would consider the world-view of all participants, defining and developing solutions that cater to both a euro-centric and Te Ao Māori perspective.
Step 6: By Māori for Māori
All people want and deserve agency over their lives. The opportunity to create environments and solutions that align with your beliefs, your ethics and your cultural norms. Māori, as with any other people, aspire to engage with businesses, schools, health providers, community groups, sporting organisations and more, whose environment and engagement aligns with the Māori worldview.
This is what we mean when we say, by Māori, for Māori.
Discover our services
Maurea’s Services
We offer a range of services; each designed to support the understanding and application of Māori culture.
All our training programmes are designed to be approachable and inclusive. Led by our acclaimed Te Kaa programme, we offer a wide range of training opportunities.
Designed to assist organisations in all things Māori – including organisational transformation, strategy development, branding, public speaking engagements, cultural advisory services and more.
We have a number of translators, including our lead who has been through the rigorous process of becoming Toi Reo Māori Accredited, meaning you can have absolute confidence in the accuracy of our translation services. We can translate either into Te Reo Māori, or from Te Reo Māori.
We partner with organisations that support our vision to see Māori culture drive Aotearoa forward.