Institutionalised, Then Corporatised: What Reuben Araroa Had to Leave Behind
When Reuben Araroa moved into iwi leadership, one of his uncles gave him a blunt welcome.
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t bring those pākehā ideas over here. We know where you’re from.”
Reuben had spent most of his working life in non-Māori settings. His grandfather had him sent to a non-Māori school, the military followed, and corporate roles followed that. He puts it in his own words:
“Then I get institutionalised in the military and then I end up getting corporatised.”
He took the warning as it was intended, as a message that this place needed different things from him. His explanation is that each of those earlier environments had shaped him for its own context. That is easy to miss from the inside. The habits that earned the last promotion, the pace, the planning and the instinct to produce, feel like personal strengths rather than local ones, so they arrive as the measure for judging everything in the new room.
A leader who has just taken over a team, joined a board or moved into a different sector faces a real decision in the first weeks: apply the old measure, or find out what this room values first. A room built on different priorities can look slow or unfocused by the old measure, and the leader ends up correcting a problem that was never there.
Learning to sit and listen
The first adjustment was physical. In iwi settings Reuben would sit and listen to others speak for five or six hours with very small breaks, which he calls “a very harsh lesson in stoicism.” His army years had prepared him to hold one position for a long time, like an observation post or a listening post, and he still found it more tiring than he expected. With people twice his age sitting through the same hours on either side of him, he found it inspiring.
Chris Turkington, the host, asked what that was like after years of deadlines and being contactable around the clock. Reuben’s working life had run on productivity, efficiency, hitting goals and lifting the bar again, and his answer was that the destination had changed while the effort had not.
“The goal is different. Getting there is the same.”
In practice that meant treating attention as the work. He describes his role in those settings as sitting upright for the whole session and looking attentive to every speaker and visitor, and he calls it an important role. A leader who scores a day by what it produces will log those hours as lost. The more useful question, and the one Reuben starts with, is what role the occasion is giving you.
The same question applies at a client site, in a new team’s first meeting or through a long consultation. The leader who decides what the time is for before arriving will spend it differently from the one who is quietly waiting for it to end.
Letting go of the plan
Planning was the second adjustment. Reuben knew tikanga but was still learning te reo, and at a national level the stakes go up and everyone is watching how you carry yourself. He had to accept that not everything in that space could be controlled. One uncle told him to calm down and said his journey had been written in the stars before he was born. Where Reuben came from, forecasting three, ten and twenty years out was the job, so this was a real change.
“I’ve arrived here for a reason. The fact I don’t understand that reason is OK.”
Planning gives a leader something to hold when pressure rises, which is why giving it up is hard. Reuben’s version is to stay in the room without a forecast and absorb what is happening, and he says it taught him to “quiet my mind.”
Chris recognised the pull from his own life. At home with his family, he said, he can still be thinking about a deal on the table or a call he needs to make, with a sense of guilt that he isn’t doing enough. Reuben said it comes up with the clients he works with, because the world keeps adding to what we are expected to do. He gives AI as an example, where one simple question becomes a rabbit hole of added detail. His answer is practical. Letting go, he says, is “a skill set that needs to be practiced,” which means presence gets trained like any other leadership skill.
What he kept from the army
Reuben joined the military at sixteen and still speaks of it with pride. One lesson came from an aluminium mess tin: leave a spot of dirt in it and you were punished, because that speck could make someone sick in the field. At the time he thought it was about dirt. He now calls it “layers of consequence,” where one dropped standard connects to other consequences further along. Chris, who served in the Air Force, made the same case for polishing boots and making beds, which are a vehicle for a larger set of behaviours.
Reuben would change one thing about how it was taught.
“They assumed we wouldn’t understand the theory.”
Instead of explaining why the standards mattered, instructors used direct authoritarian methods to shape and break them down, and he calls that a missed opportunity. He still says he wouldn’t change the experience, and the friendships from that year have lasted for life. The two views sit together easily. A leader can hold a standard firmly and still explain it, and the explanation is what lets a person apply the standard in a situation nobody anticipated. Reuben applies the same thinking to young people today and warns against assuming “they’re only going to learn one way and that way is your way.”
Moments an organisation can create
Reuben’s account of wairuatanga is the hardest part of the conversation to pin down. He points to the haka before an All Blacks match and the spine tingle people recognise, and says te ao Māori produces that feeling often. Chris answered with his own experience. As chief instructor of the RNZAF recruit school, he watched each graduating course perform a haka for the incoming recruits. The first time, with around a hundred people in front of him, he cried. He describes immense pride and says he can’t fully describe the feeling.
Reuben’s view is that organisations have comparable moments available and miss them.
“There are times where there are special moments in organizations that I believe are missed opportunities to generate the wairua of what you experienced in front of your haka.”
He puts the cause down to organisations not embracing the culture around them, so they don’t recognise the chance. He is honest about the limits: “we can’t put a box around it and we can’t be scientific about it,” and that is one of the challenges of adopting it in mainstream settings.
For a leader the practical point is attention. A graduation, a handover, a first day or a farewell already carries weight for the people in it, and whether the leader treats it as an agenda item or as an occasion shapes how it lands. Chris said he had never considered this as a tool a leader can use.
Staying open to being wrong
Asked what the next generation of leaders should be taught, Reuben said he prefers to offer information for people to consider. As a younger leader he was very certain about many things, and he says that certainty was short-lived. He has since watched leaders commit to a direction, invest more, and find it very hard to pull out. Some double down to prove they were right. Each added month or dollar makes the original direction harder to question.
He closes with a picture of climbing a mountain. The higher you go, the further you can see, and from the summit you may find the mountain you should have been on is somewhere else. At that point, he says, you have a decision to make.
“Do I walk all the way back down muttering to myself about the wasted energy of climbing that mountain or do I pretend that the one I’m on is the one I should be on?”
Reuben Araroa is the founder of Whakaaro, a military veteran and an iwi and business leader. He joined Chris Turkington on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.
The full conversation also covers how Reuben approaches pressure in large operational teams, why he believes good processes protect people, and the guiding principles he uses to give others responsibility without micromanaging them.
The Fireside Leadership Podcast is brought to you by Aegis Leadership. Thanks to Dark Horse Coffee for powering the show.
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