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Premiere Leadership Educators Barry and Jeanne Frew
to Teach Groundbreaking High Order Thought Skills to WAVE Leadership Program

By Michelle Netzloff-Luna
Cedar Street Times - June 21, 2019

"Leadership is an action verb, and that action always has to have a higher purpose associated with it. Unless you take that action, you are not being a leader." - Barry Frew

When it comes to leadership skills, Jeanne and Barry Frew are power houses. As tenured faculty at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School, Dr. Barry Frew founded and directed the Center for Executive Education. His programs are credited with changing the culture of Navy leadership, changing the dialogue within the Navy, and helping leaders there create a vision of future possibilities and outcomes by expanding awareness and perception. Admiral Vern Clark, Former Chief of Naval Operations, described the impact of Frew's work at NPS in this way:

“Dr. Frew single-handedly effected fundamental change to the professional development and growth of a generation of flag officers and members of the SES (Senior Executive Service). His profound influence will shape the Navy's executive leadership well into the 21st century.”

After 19 productive years at NPS, Frew left his tenured faculty position to start Frew & Associates, a successful independent consulting firm that provides high performing and high potential leaders an expanded set of management, leadership, teaming and high performance concepts. He designed his trademark High Order Thought model, and has educated and coached a plethora of prominent companies and organizations in the public and private sector, including NASA, Google, Oracle, and Keurig Green Mountain Coffee. The Frew and Associates programs are credited for fostering monumental shifts and have been heralded as life changing.

“This learning experience broke our shells and reshaped each of us… the gift was helping us all to see ourselves and our organizations in ways we had not even considered.” – CDR Dave Nystrom

Jeanne Frew's leadership experience is impressive as well. She is the designer and instructor of the exceptional Expanding Boundaries, a Frew and Associates 5-day seminar which provides learning opportunities for a cross-section of an organization's members from the ground level to the senior executive levels in order to cultivate learning and transparency at all levels. This is powerful because the integration of all organizational levels allows for rich dialog and different perspectives. She has worked extensively with the Federal Government, and has helped government organizations successfully use complex systems rather than being hindered by them. She is applauded for being “successful in getting organizations to achieve organizational alignment and transformational leadership by helping individuals work together, stay focused and get results.”

The Way You Behave is Because of What You Believe and How You Think.

Jeanne and Barry believe the foundation for more effective leadership is in addressing thought and behavior. This is accomplished by applying the four factors of High Order Thought:
1. Mindstate or State of Mind - the aspect of experience which creates our reality; emotions are the feedback loop.
2. Communicating - which involves listening to understand while remaining open and present as well as effective words and body language
3. Thinking - which requires one to become aware of one's own intentions, motivations, beliefs, filters and biases
4. Reflecting - which means taking time to consider experiences and to generate insights and deeper understanding.

The pay off for consistently improving these fundamental factors, the Frew's have found, includes better performance, alignment, decisions, productivity, communication, execution, and leadership. It is this model the Frew's are planning to bring to the WAVE Leadership Program.

Barry and Jeanne share their wisdom on leadership and why they got interested in coaching kids.

Barry: “These last two years I was asked to be a guest speaker for the leadership class at Carmel Middle School. When I began the program, the kids were under the impression that leadership implied strength, and follower-ship implied weakness. I began to probe, and we started talking about how leaders need followers and how really good leaders need to become followers themselves in order to be able to grow their capacity to lead. Not only will you lead others, but you will let them lead sometimes and you will willingly follow in a helpful, positive way.
It seemed to intrigued them and I hope new insights were developed.
The resulting dialog impressed me. They were thoughtful, reflective and willing to share. It made me reflect 'I wish someone had told me about Mindstate when I was young so I could use it from that point forward to help me make better choices.' It made Jeanne and I consider maybe our material is just as good for teenagers as it is for the executives that we began doing it with, and it was just a matter of changing the examples and changing the language. We did a talk for the WAVE Leadership Program last year, and Darryl Smith, Executive Director, really liked it and asked us to get more involved.”

Jeanne: “Our program for the kids this year will be a mixture of things that inspire them to think differently and behave differently, and to look at the underpinnings of factors that are present. We'll do fun activities with lessons about leadership and high performance behaviors, and then we'll practice, starting every morning with a Reflection period, which is a key factor of the Higher Order Thought model. During reflection, we take time to consider and generate insights that lead to deeper understanding, deeper curiosity, richer connections and new perspectives.”

Barry: “This model supports our belief that you should treat life like it's a series of sprints: work really hard, deplete yourself then use reflection time to rest and recover, and to learn new insights. You can develop insights into new belief systems, new ways of viewing things, things that are now connected in different ways making it more powerful, or stop believing in a particular way. Reflection is the source for all these deep insights. We'll do this everyday so they not only get an opportunity to see how this feels intellectually, but also to share these reflections. At the end, they will be better at being transparent, being vulnerable, building trust and sharing their insights with one another... true life skills.

For executives, we come into contact with people who are literally going from one meeting to another and another and another, never having properly prepared for any of them, and not taking any time to reflect or learn any lessons from their entire day. They're just on this treadmill. It's our belief you can get faster by focusing on important things and slowing down.
Turns out kids are experiencing the same thing in their daily lives. They are so chock-a-blocked with activities and things that divert their attention constantly, I don't think they understand how these distractions really affect their performance. We hope to help them deal with the pressures of maturing by slowing down, reflecting and understanding what's going on with the emotions, attached with the thinking and how they are related to behavior.
We'll spend a fair amount of time on the foundations like making them more aware of our tendency to see things through our own perspective, and then thinking that's the way things are. In reality, we have a lot of blind spots, biases and filters. We see things as we are, not as they are. We will practice becoming aware of that in the moment, so they can stop thinking that what they're speaking is necessarily the truth just because that's the way they think. We want to show them why we behave like we do, and in our model, the way you behave is because of what you believe and how you think.
In our work with executives we have a lot of people emphasizing behavioral change. 'Can you create a behavioral change on our team?' They just want the behavior changed and don't understand the power of changing the thinking.
But we've found you can't get sustainable, reliable behavioral change until you look at what you believe and how you think. Once thinking and beliefs have changed, the behavioral change will happen automatically and it's sustainable. It's simple, but not easy and it takes longer to make it stick. A bias for many executives is the thinking that if you can't observe it and measure it, then its not important or impactful. But a lot of things that impact high performance in a sustainable way are not quantifiable. It's really a paradox.”

Jeanne: “We'll also work on values. Because belief systems drive behavior, it's important to understand what your values are and living those values as opposed to falling victim to whatever is happening in the moment.
We will give them an assessment for their talents and strengths, and talk about how they can understand their top three strengths and play with those, while not ignoring their weaknesses. If you invest in your strengths you can make leaps and bounds in improvements for things you are passionate about.
We're bringing in outside speakers as well, and we've coordinated our foundational message with all the people who are coming in. We'll have speakers from industry, academia, sports and dance. We have fun activities planned in the community, with a trip to CSUMB to visit L.E.A.D. (Leadership Experience for Athlete Development), a leadership program for student athletes. It will also give the kids a chance to see CSUMB if they haven't had a chance to do so.”

Barry: “Dawn Allinger Lewis will be part of our program too. She'll be doing her week with the 10-12 year olds, but she's also coming to our Leadership program for an afternoon to teach the 13 year olds Team Handball. She'll be integrating our concepts about leading and following, collaborating and innovating, so the learning of the sport will be modified around our message. She's very interested in sharing with the 13 year olds leadership lessons that she's learned as an Olympian that she wishes she had known when she was 13.

My hope is that the kids will be able to define their path forward in a higher, more productive and successful way by absorbing these key takeaways from our program:
*Understand how their thinking adjusts what their experience is, and be able to control that in the moment.
*Understand energy follows intent: To be clear about their intentions, and then let the energy follow that.
*Understand the importance of Inter-dependency. We live with the inhale/exhale concept of inter-dependency all the time, but we don't really think about the fact it's not an either/or. I've never seen anyone advocating for just inhaling. In daily life we may ask ourselves,'should I take care of myself of take care of the others?' The answer is of course both, like inhaling and exhaling.”

Jeanne: “At the end of the program, we'll have the kids use reflection and go back over their last two weeks, look at the highlights and the low spots and write themselves a letter in which they describe what they are intending to do now as a result of having completed the WAVE Leadership Program. We tell them, 'We won't read it, it's just a letter from you to you.' In 90 days we mail it back to them. When they receive it, they will have these instructions: 'go someplace that's quiet, no distractions. Read the letter you wrote to yourself and see how you're doing. Whatever spoke to you and had a meaningful impact on you will be in that letter.' We've found these letters really help extend the learning.”

Barry: “My hope is that they acted on what is in those letters, and built some sort of new process. If they have, then we will have hit a home run!”

It is not enough to excel in your current surroundings...you must also envision and create the future. – Barry and Jeanne Frew