Listen to the full interview:
1. What inspired you to work in academia, particularly with military students?
“I come from an academic family. Both my father and my brother are academics. What brought me to work with military officers was somewhat serendipitous. After graduate school, I was at a small liberal arts college, but it wasn’t the perfect fit. My background is in operations research. It’s technical and involves a lot of math and computers. My thought was to be in an operations research department, teaching what I was learning and doing research in, but I found myself teaching quantitative methods in a business school. I enjoyed it for a while because it was something new—I love learning new things—but ultimately it wasn’t a good fit.
I remember at one point I asked them, ‘Why did you hire me in the first place?’
In academia, you give a seminar, then they decide to hire you. They said, ‘Well, when you gave your seminar, we didn’t understand any of it, but you seemed pretty smart.’
Around then, there was an opening in an operations research department at a military graduate university. They wanted to hire one of the professors I knew, but he declined and recommended me. That’s when I came here. I have never been in the military myself. I hadn’t really had it on my mind, but it was an operations research department, one of the premier ones in all of academia, so it was a very exciting prospect.
In a larger sense, I felt it was my service to the country to do this kind of thing. I have absolutely loved working with the military students, not to put down civilian students; I love them in their way. The students I teach now are very smart, dedicated, hard-working, and take the education process seriously. They’re a wonderful group of students to be teaching.”
2. Working in this sector, what have you noticed about their jobs? Is it a career or vocation? What’s your take on that?
“Like all segments, there’s variability, but I would say for the most part, for most of the officers I teach, it is the higher calling. When you choose a military career, it’s often for serving a higher purpose. The other thing at a slightly more micro-level is the students all write a master’s thesis that involves doing work outside of the classroom.
A lot of the students I have advised say, ‘You know at one of my previous billets, we had this problem, and it never got solved, and it’s been sticking with me ever since.’
So many times, they would do their thesis on a problem they had encountered previously. Why? Because it was something they saw as being valuable, something that would contribute and help the mission of their service and they wanted to solve it. It wasn’t just wanting to check all the boxes and get their piece of paper—they wanted to make a difference.”
3. For people in the corporate world, how could they be inspired to find purpose and a higher calling? How can they elevate their role from a job to vocation?
“I’ve never been in the corporate world myself. All of my career has been in academia, but I’ve really taken in working with military and seeing the higher purpose, the higher value. In other words, the product or service you’re engaged with in your company, regardless of your role, how is it making life better? You see this in a lot of companies. The most successful ones really connect with that sense of value. We are making life better for many people and not just making a lot of money.”
4. One of your fortes is communication. Why is it important in the workplace, and what have you seen in your field? How do great leaders in the military communicate?
“This was a bit of a revelation to me because prior to working with the military, my sense was the stereotypical thing of the commanding officer barking orders and everybody going, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘Yes, ma’am.’ There are certainly cases where that’s the situation, but those are typically not very effective.
From speaking with higher-ranking officers, I learned that there was this concept of commander’s intent rather than barking orders. The thing about the barking orders is it’s the equivalent to micromanaging. Micromanaging is saying: okay, you’ve got to do it just like this. In the military, there are doctrines. But the thing is, what makes the U.S. military unique is that there’s more flexibility in applying the doctrine.
For example, in a particular operation, take this idea of commander’s intent. The effective commander will communicate what the objectives are and allow the subordinates to achieve their piece of the objectives however they may, rather than micromanaging it. That proves to be very effective.
Again, it comes back to this idea of commander’s intent. The commander who communicates the intent of the objectives effectively will have a successful operation, not because everything is planned out to the finest detail, but because everybody is working in the same direction.”
5. You co-authored a book, Hear Here: Engaging with Our Aware, Loving Heart. What’s your book about and how does it help people?
“It came about through an entirely different channel. One of the consequences of having a demanding career, such as academia, is that it can take a big toll on relationships. My career did just that with my marriage 24 years ago. Around 2000, things went downhill. It was through my focus on my career that I neglected my marriage and family. As a result, we separated. My wife filed for divorce. We had three children who were school age. It was sad. Those are some of the worst times of my life.
My wife came to me and said, ‘Okay, we’re always going to be connected through our children. We need to learn how to talk to each other because we clearly have not been able to do that.’
She dragged me to this class on interpersonal communication, which I never would have signed up for in my wildest dreams. It was taught by a woman who was local to the Mani Peninsula. Her name was Selwa Said. She had been teaching since the 1980s. It opened a whole new vista for me. Part of the reason I was attracted to academia is I’m a lifelong learner. I like learning new things. This was so different than the math and computers I’d been working with, but it was fascinating to me because I was so bad at it. I kept taking the classes, trying to apply what she was teaching. She was teaching listening in a way that hears, understands, and validates the other person without making them wrong, without disagreeing, which of course ran counter to my proclivity, which is to analyze and argue and think I’m right. The other side of it taught you how to express your needs without being critical, without blaming, in a way that gives the other person their best chance of receiving the message.
I started to acquire it in interactions with my wife and our relationship got magically better. Within a couple of years, we reconciled. That was 20 years ago, and we’ve been together ever since, with ups and downs, as does every relationship.
To get back to the book, what happened was, sadly, she passed away in 2020. This was right before COVID hit, and she had never written a book. She didn’t advertise a lot, meaning her approach was not well-known outside of the few people who had learned from her. This made me get together with another one of her students and we wrote this book, which is our understanding of what her teachings were because we didn’t want it to pass with her. It was just too important and too impactful to go away.
We’ve branded it as simpatico. Simpatico is about an empathic interaction that makes a difference, especially in areas in relationships where there’s a conflict. If you remember that simpatico, that heart-to-heart connection, even as you’re disagreeing about things, it can make all the difference.”
6. You say communication is simple but not easy. What do you mean by this?
“Communication consists of one person sending a message and the other person receiving the message. Very simple. What’s not so easy about it is if either one of those gets disrupted, then there’s no communication. For example, if the message is unclear or maybe critical or accusatory, then it’s hard for the other person to receive it. You can have clear, perfect communication, but if the other person isn’t open to receiving it, then communication has not occurred.
Many communication approaches say, ‘Okay, here’s how you can say it most effectively.’ And that’s important, but the other side is equally, if not more important. How can you receive communication if something that comes at you makes you feel uncomfortable? What can you do about it? That’s probably one of the most valuable things I learned from Selwa Said: by not taking things personally and having specific ways of validating the other person, you can make that shift.”
You vs. I
“When requesting a change, avoid the use of the word ‘you.’ Why? Because if I’m requesting a change and somebody hears ‘you,’ there’s going to be an internal block. Don’t use ‘you’ when you’re trying to request a change from someone else, only use ‘I.’”
Passive Voice vs. Active Voice
“That has some interesting implications for the use of the passive voice versus the active voice. It turns out when requesting a change, a passive voice is actually more impactful than the active voice. The reason is the passive voice is more easily received by the other person than the active voice. The active voice tends to be more accusatory. That’s a little counterproductive. Nobody likes to be told what to do. They want to be able to make a choice. Instead of the typical message that says, ‘I want you to do x, y, z’ take the ‘you’ away. Instead, if I communicate what I want my desired result to be without telling the other person what to do or how to do it, then that gives them the space to either choose or maybe not choose how to meet that. In other words, I’m not telling you what to do, but I’m telling you what I want my experience to be.
For example, let’s say my partner likes to leave dirty dishes in the sink, and I don’t like that. Instead of saying, ‘I want you to clean your dishes or take them out of the sink,’ I might say something like, ‘When I come into the kitchen, I find the sink is full of dirty dishes, which makes it difficult to prepare breakfast. As a result, I’m often late. I want to be assured that the sink will be cleared of dishes when I come down in the morning.’”
Tracking
“Then, I need to apply the tracking skill, which is the other side of things, the listening skill, the validating. I might say something like, ‘So you might find it hard to meet this request?’ Notice there I switched to the ‘you.’ When I’m listening, I only use the word ‘you’ and not the word ‘I.’”
Interviewer
Finka Jerkovic
Career Advancement Coach and Founder of Finka Inc.
With 25+ years in leadership and sales and the financial services industry, she has witnessed the power of recognizing and celebrating people’s unique strengths and differences (a.k.a Brilliant Differences™) within a workplace. When everyone’s unique talents are appreciated and people work together using them, that’s when the real magic of career and business growth happens. Fast forward 10 years. Finka has established programs that help mid-career professionals and leaders grow in their careers by tapping into the full potential of their personal brand, so they can clearly define their strengths, value their differences, and perform at their best.
Interviewee
Arnie Buss
Research Associate Professor, Relationship Coach, Co-Author of Hear Here: Engaging with Our Aware, Loving Heart
Arnie Buss is passionate about communication and how it impacts workplace relationships. He’s the co-owner of the Simpatico Communication Method.
