Ship & Naval

Friday, March 07, 2008

By Mass Communications Specialist 2^nd Class (SW) Corey Truax

Focusing on the senior ranks of  Navy and DOD’s military and civilian leadership, the Naval Postgraduate School’s (NPS) Center for Executive Education (CEE) will achieve in this academic year an approximate 300 percent increase in course load and student throughput.

In attempting to keep up with the increasing demand for executive education and professional development opportunities for military leaders, the CEE strives to deliver highly relevant programs that help senior executives and their staffs to better understand emerging strategic and policy issues and resource management practices.

In a three-year period from 2006 to 2008, CEE evolved from an organization that delivered six courses with a total of 168 students to hosting 22 courses involving more than 500 students.

This growth also increased the range of opportunities for NPS faculty campus wide to participate in executive education program offerings in multiple and varied ways - as subject matter experts in their academic fields of study and research, as working group/team facilitators, as personal feedback coaches with students in an executive survey session, and in new course development efforts supporting emerging career-long education requirements for future leaders.

CEE Director Ron Franklin feels there are a number of factors working in the Center’s favor to account for this growth, the primary explanation being an increased appreciation for executive education at the highest levels of the Navy. Noteworthy too, is the fact that retired Vice Adm. Phil Quast, the Executive Learning Officer (ELO) of the Navy, has fostered the emergence and development of the NPS CEE as the official Navy corporate university.

“This place had been a small-scale executive learning center since 1999, but it didn’t start to have a large clientele until 2002 when the ELO organization under Admiral Quast was formed,” explained Franklin.

Charged with the task of providing leadership development, resource management, strategic planning and innovation tools to the Navy community of flag officers and senior civilians, Quast began using his service experience and vision to expand the use of the CEE faculty and the NPS faculty resources as much as he could.  Networking served as his primary tool.

“The ELO has used his influence at all levels in the Navy to help expand our curriculum into a wider, more aggressive range of courses,” said Franklin. “As time went on, our reputation for effectiveness in delivering high-quality courses tailored to the needs of the senior leadership got around. Now the leadership of the Navy believes in this organization, and they appreciate it.”

One reason the Navy supports CEE is that it is constantly hearing of the good things the Center does.

“When participants finish a course, here they are required to send a wrap-up email to the seniors in their chain of command,” Franklin explained. “So not only does that person, who is normally a Navy captain or senior GS [government service] manager, leave here with a high sense of motivation, empowerment and vitality, but their bosses get to hear about the value of the NPS experience and what they have accomplished in those CEE courses as well.”

This feedback system works as the biggest marketing tool CEE uses to expand its reach to new stakeholders. “We have 500 participants coming through here a year and those 500 people are collectively sending their feedback emails out to virtually every admiral in the Navy - the message is definitely getting out,” said Franklin.

CEE also provides NPS faculty with the unique chance to display their  teaching skills and impressive academic and practical knowledge by working with these executive learners.

“NPS has an enormous and valuable base of talented faculty,” said Franklin. “We want to expose the Navy and DOD to this world-class faculty, and we are constantly connecting our students with them for further consultation and problem solving collaboration.  These are not normal classroom lectures, as Navy captains and admirals do not just sit there and listen, but rather they inquire and they challenge. They want dialogue and the opportunity to provide feedback. Many faculty instructors will not have as much of an experiential base as those captains or admirals, who come with perspectives and questions based on that professional experience. So this really helps everyone involved to learn from the interaction and exchange of ideas.”

Another aspect of CEE is the environment. Stepping though the doors of the CEE wing on the third floor of Ingersoll Hall, one steps into an executive learning environment. The entire facility, including the state-of-the-art tiered classroom, furnishings, information technology and video teleconference equipment, and professional treatment are all a step above standard academic facilities and are intended to mirror the learning environment which leading universities and the corporate world provide for executive education participants.

“What makes us feel good is when a Navy captain who’s going to be in command of 5,000 people on an aircraft carrier comes in and says this was the best experience and most rewarding training program in his entire career,” said Franklin. “Twenty-four years in this person’s outstanding military career and now this is the best experience he’s had – ever. That’s the part about it that gives us the best feeling here.”

CEE is about more than just good experiences, it’s about results.

“It’s good that participants come through CEE and enjoy the treatment but what we are looking for are tangible results,” said Franklin. “They say things like, ‘This broadened my business knowledge,’ ‘refocused my priorities’ and, ‘This course gave me the fundamentals and empowered me to shift the way I think to a new level.’ Those are the real impacts on the persons who come to NPS and the value we look forward to delivering in every course. We want something that will tell us that they have reshaped the direction they were going and reshaped the direction of their command decisions.”

With many high-ranking and high-profile leaders traveling to NPS to speak to the students, including former Chief of Naval Operations, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen on several occasions, students receive the insight and top-level interaction that help them to develop the mindset and the tools they will need to prosper in advanced leadership positions.

Franklin feels that CEE’s number of courses and students attending are only going to increase as time goes on. “There’s an expression in the business world that goes something like this, ‘If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always got.’ That’s a violation of the goal of executive education in general. You can’t strive for the same results. You must always strive for better.”

For more information about the CEE visit www.cee.nps.navy.mil.

Former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Mullen talks to the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Executive Education (CEE) attendees in one of the CEE conference rooms. US Navy Photo by Javier Chagoya.