An effective coaching relationship offers professional and lay leaders a place to turn for support, reflection, guidance, and perspective. Eitzah faculty create individual coaching relationships in partnership with religious community leaders.

People often leave leadership workshops with sound ideas and great enthusiasm, and begin the exciting work of creating engaging projects and capturing the imaginations and energies of others. Over time, however, momentum slows, even halts, as professional and lay leaders become caught up in their daily tasks and the habits and routines of their religious communities. It is at such moments that having external coaches on whom to call becomes important, not as a luxury, but as a basic necessity for leaders. Effective coaches offer voices of experience. They offer perspective and counsel. They offer support and affirmation. They serve as a kind of moreh n'voo-cheem, a guide for when we are perplexed or confused, sharing of the chochmah/wisdom they have gained for the betterment of all.

The Coaching Relationship

Eitzah Center faculty members focus on creating coaching relationships that enable professional and lay leaders to solve immediate issues and problems while developing their capacities and skills for handling complex organizational challenges. Working with individual leaders, coaches offer relevant guidance and counsel, based on their experience and research, yet do so in the context of dialogue that enables leaders to reflect on their own thoughts, actions, emotions and relationships. Coaching relationships are thus successful to the extent that leaders feel that they received concrete help and support with their immediate situations while learning the perspectives and skills necessary to solve similar problems in the future.

The Eitzah coaching relationship lends itself particularly well as a tool for assisting professional and lay leaders with the following types of issues:

• Managing stress, avoiding burnout, balancing work and family.
• Building effective staff teams
• Clarifying organizational roles, tasks, and decision-making
• Creating effective lay-professional partnerships
• Managing, mentoring, and evaluating others
• Developing and implementing strategic visions
• Board development
• Leadership transitions (lay and professional)
• Managing change projects and processes
• Involving congregants effectively

These and a number of other issues are examined in some depth during workshops and programs, where participants learn to think and act effectively to deal with them. Yet professional and lay leaders are likely to encounter situations that contain obstacles for which they are not fully prepared — a crisis, sharp resistance to change, conflicts that threaten to spin out of control, staff or leader transitions, and the like. While effective leaders are usually able to act reasonably well in such situations, they often do so at some cost to themselves, their projects, or their religious communities. The purpose of coaching is to avoid or minimize those costs, and to provide leaders (particularly those who find themselves isolated in their visions of changes that create vibrant religious communities) with support and counsel.

The Coaching Model

The Eitzah coaching process follows a model drawn from the practices of effective executive coaches. The model involves four general phases that occur in each coaching interaction. Together, these phases enable coaches to help leaders develop and implement solutions to immediate issues as well as develop their capacities to think and act effectively in complex organizational situations.

In the first phase, Discovery, coaches elicit information from individuals that enables them to discover the nature of the situation. Coaches ask questions about events (what is or will be happening), interpretations (why it is happening), experiences (what it is like to have this happening), patterns (when in the past it has happened before), and feelings (what it feels like to have this happening). These questions enable coaches to learn enough about the situation to be effective in helping individuals think and act appropriately.

In the second phase, Diagnosis, coaches help individuals develop a well-rounded understanding of the situation. When confronted with a situation that feels important or stressful, people tend to quickly narrow in on particular stories that help them make sense of what is occurring. These preferred stories tend to focus on particular explanations (such as locating the blame on a specific person, committee, system, or event) and thus narrow greatly the range of options available to leaders. In this phase, the coach helps leaders consider a number of perspectives and possibilities, until the various dimensions of a situation are examined and a comprehensive diagnosis is developed to guide further action.

In the third phase, Generation and Assessment of Alternatives for Action, coaches help individuals develop and evaluate the various courses of action that they can take to deal effectively with current or upcoming situations and issues. The coaches guide leaders through the process of thinking about the outcomes they want to achieve, the best ways to achieve those outcomes, who they need to influence and how to do so, and so on. Leaders are then asked to evaluate the costs and benefits of the various alternatives, and to select those that make the most sense to pursue.

Finally, coaches help individuals with Action Planning. This involves helping leaders think carefully about the actual steps they will take to resolve situations, involve others appropriately, and assess the results of their efforts.

Throughout these phases, Eitzah coaches provide various types of support. They offer relevant resources (such as best practices, surveys, and useful readings). They offer personal support, affirming and challenging individuals. They offer the perspective of those who are outside yet understand the situations that mark congregational life and pose challenges to professional and lay leaders.

Coaching Logistics

Coaching occurs in the context of ongoing relationships between Center faculty and individual clergy and lay leaders. Participants of workshops and programs are matched with Center faculty during residential sessions, who provide coaching as part of those programs. Individuals not currently enrolled in programs may request a coach by contacting an Eitzah staff member, who will assist in locating an appropriate coach.

Coaching sessions are conducted in various ways. Faculty coaches maintain contact with individuals (by telephone and skype) where much of the coaching process occurs — and, wherever possible, in person. Electronic communication allows coaches to share and receive information, updates, resource materials, and to schedule conversations and meetings. The timing and frequency of coaching sessions are mutually determined; coaches will both check in at pre-arranged intervals and be available as needed to leaders who request support.

Coaching can be arranged for a particular issue or skill or on a retainer (i.e., as needed basis).  All coaching is concretized in a brit katan annually.