Peer coaching relationships provide rabbis and lay leaders with trustworthy sources of feedback, support, and problem-solving. Without such relationships, synagogue leaders remain relatively isolated from others who intuitively understand the demands of their roles.

Professional and lay leaders at times find themselves needing to consult with others who intuitively understand the nature of their work, issues, and organizations. They also need trusting relationships with peers that allow them to regularly reflect on their practices, their visions for their synagogues and work, and their progress toward those visions. Yet rabbis, cantors, and lay leaders do always have access to peers with whom they may consult or create such trusting relationships, for a variety of reasons. It is relatively rare for these individuals to locate peers in their own communities.

More commonly, clergy and lay leaders work in relative isolation, maintaining their own counsel. Rabbis and cantors may have a few colleagues, often geographically scattered, with whom they infrequently and irregularly connect about the deeper issues surrounding their work and their efforts to remain spiritually alive in the face of countless demands and competing agendas. Lay leaders may or may not have a few colleagues in their synagogues in whom they can confide. Such support, for both professional and lay leaders, is limited. Rabbis and cantors, unfortunately, often view colleagues located nearby as competitors for the same congregants. They may also not make the time for themselves to foster and use close collegial relationships. And too, rabbis and cantors, like others in caregiving professions, often limit how much help they ask for and open themselves to, not wishing to appear needy or vulnerable. Lay leaders may not have ready access to colleagues from other synagogues. The extent to which they may confide in others in their own synagogues may be limited by the various competing agendas, politics, and history that tend to characterize synagogue life.

Eitzah's peer coaching service provides professional and lay leaders with colleagues from various geographical areas with peer coaches. Research clearly shows that when people are in peer coaching relationships, they are less stressed, more deliberate in their actions, and draw from a range of alternative perspectives and options in the choices that they make. This service is designed to provide these benefits to synagogue clergy and lay leaders.

The Peer Coaching Relationship

The peer coaching relationships encouraged by Center faculty enable professional and lay leaders to help one another look carefully at their own practices as leaders, change agents, and managers. Peer coaches are both peers (people who are in similar roles, perform similar tasks, and confront similar issues in similar settings) and coaches (people who help provide perspective, insights, and alternatives for action). As coaches, peers may offer relevant advice and counsel, based on their own experiences, yet do so as colleagues who listen carefully and help others reflect on their own thoughts, actions, and emotions. Effective peer coaches provide a place for others to go where they know they will be understood, empathized with, heard and challenged to be as effective as they can be in difficult roles and situations.

The Eitzah peer coaching service 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
• Making the transition into and out of leadership roles
• Building effective staff teams
• Creating effective lay-professional partnerships
• Managing, mentoring, and evaluating others
• Dealing with conflict
• Managing change projects and processes
• Involving congregants effectively

These and a number of other issues are examined in some depth during Institute programs, where participants learn to think and act effectively to deal with them. When professional and lay leaders confront these issues in the daily context of their work, however, they often feel isolated, left to deal with them on their own. In addition to any coaching relationships they may have with Center faculty, they benefit a great deal by having access to peers who can respond with empathy, understanding, and help.

The Peer Coaching Process

The Eitzah peer coaching process involves the creation of mutually sustaining relationships. Peers serve as coaches for one another. The coaching pairs are made in the context of a Center program-Rabbinical Leadership Institute, Lay Leadership Institute, Transitional Training Institute, Senior Boot Camp, or Team Building Institute. Rabbis are matched with rabbis, cantors with cantors, lay leaders with lay leaders. Pairings are made according to similarity in types of congregations, and the issues that they or their leaders face. As part of each Center program, participants are trained in the peer coaching process and provided with time, resources and support in the development of their relationships. Individuals who have been but are not currently enrolled in Institute programs may request a peer coach by contacting an Eitzah staff member, who will assist in locating an appropriate peer.

Peer coaches are trained during Institute programs to provide one another with perspective, insight, understanding, and support. Such conversations often have a tone of problem-solving, as coaching pairs think through together the nature of a specific situation and its possible resolutions. To enable these conversations, participants are taught the importance of four different skills in making their interactions and relationships most productive. These skills mirror those used in the faculty coaching process.

The first skill, Inquiry, involves peer coaches eliciting information enabling them to discover the nature of the situation. They 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). They thus learn enough about situations to be effective in helping others think and act appropriately.

The second skill, Supporting, involves peer coaches showing that they understand described situations, empathize with their peers, and are available to provide necessary support. Often enough, supporting one's peers is mostly a matter of listening carefully to them, reflecting back what is heard, carefully challenging assumptions that may be misleading or inappropriate, and remaining compassionate and non-evaluative. Presented with such support, others often feel validated enough to return to troubling situations secure in the knowledge that they are joined rather than alone in their actions.

A third skill, Generating Alternatives, enables peer coaches to help others consider a number of perspectives and possibilities, until the various dimensions of a situation are examined. Peer coaches can often help individuals develop and evaluate different courses of action, and select those that make the most sense, given the particulars of their situations. Here, peer coaches perform a valuable function of offering ideas, suggestions, feedback, and other inputs that enable others to reflect on the implications of any set of actions, reminding their peers that there is more than one solution to any set of problems.

The fourth skill, Reflection, involves peer coaches stepping away from the immediate demands of any pressing situation that others face and reflecting on the other's experiences, reactions, and actions. The point of this is to help others develop insights or conclusions about an event or situation that lead to particular courses of action-and ideally, to learn about how their own actions or relationships contributed to the situations in which they found themselves. It is through such reflection that learning occurs--that is, that people can think about their experiences, develop insights, and, where appropriate, develop strategies to act in more effective ways.

Peer Coaching Logistics

The peer coaching process is largely self-managed. Peer coaches maintain contact in various ways. Telephone contact allows regular and frequent conversations. Whenever circumstances permit, in-person meetings can be most effective. Electronic communication allows peer 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, but we recommend not less than one scheduled contact per month. They may be regularly scheduled conversations, triggered by some pressing situation, or, more ideally, some combination of both.

The effectiveness of peer coaching depends on a few significant factors. Peer coaches must, of course, take the coaching process seriously, thinking of it as a valuable source of learning rather than as simply another avenue for venting. Participants also need to respect basic rules of confidentiality, agreeing within their coaching pairs that what they say remains between them; the quickest way to undermine the trust and safety that coaching pairs often develop over time is to break confidentiality. More generally, trust gets created within coaching pairs as a function of people being attentive, empathic, and helpful. Such helpfulness is less about giving advice than it is about helping one another learn how to think about problems and develop insights for themselves. For this to occur, those providing coaching need to be respectful yet challenging; to listen more than talk; to question more than answer; and to appreciate yet expand the other's story. Those receiving coaching need to be honest with themselves and others, thoughtful about underlying issues, and genuine in their desire to be coached around particular issues and events. Peer coaching relationships are also successful over the long term to the extent that both participants provide and receive coaching over time.

Throughout the process, Eitzah provides various types of support. We offer initial training. We provide relevant resources and useful readings. We offer personal support, working with peer coaches who wish to learn to be increasingly effective with one another. Eitzah also maintains a directory of program participants and interested others who agree to be involved in the peer coaching process.