PEER focuses on the personal, organizational, and spiritual development necessary for rabbis to be effective leaders of their synagogues.

• Individual development
• Organizational development
• Spiritual development

Individual development

Effective rabbis understand and enact principles of leadership. Acquiring such knowledge and the ability to apply it requires a process of individual development. personal growth in awareness and insight, skills, and the ability to reflect on oneself and one's practice. The Institute program emphasizes particular areas of individual development that include the following:

• Intellectual understanding of leadership theory and concepts
  
• Awareness of personal pre-dispositions, tendencies, and practices in the roles of institutional and congregational leader, based on self-assessments and feedback from others
  
• Articulation of personal values and mission
  
• Personal career development
  
• Work-family balance
  
• Understanding the dynamics of authority, power, transference, and counter-transference
  
• Emotional intelligence in the role of leader.
  

Organizational development

Effective rabbis also develop their organizations as vibrant, effective entities that engage and direct their members to achieve shared visions and Jewish values. This too requires a set of insights and skills by which leaders mobilize individuals, groups, and organizations toward productive action. The Institute program emphasizes the following areas of organizational development:

• Creating, clarifying, and communicating strategic visions
  
• Developing collaborative relationships with lay leaders and boards
  
• Guiding and supporting individuals toward fulfilling performance
  
• Clarifying staff roles, responsibilities, boundaries and inter-relationships
  
• Building an effective team with shared values
  
• Creating positive organizational cultures marked by innovation, accountability, collaboration and support
  
• Managing change through networks of formal and informal relationships
  
• Skill-building in the practical areas of organizational change and development (e.g., strategic visioning, analyzing organizational problems, managing and mentoring others, achieving consensus, negotiating, managing conflict, building coalitions)
  
• Clarifying appropriate organizational structures and processes.
  

Spiritual development

Effective rabbis, as spiritual leaders of religious institutions and communities, also need to continue to develop their own spirituality. These rabbis develop practices that enable them to remain connected to that which initially brought them to the rabbinate, even as they are driven to respond to the inevitable pressures of institutional leadership. Such practices enable rabbis to stay alive spiritually in the midst of other pressing demands and roles. The Institute program focuses on practices that include the following:

• Understanding and preventing burnout
  
• Developing individual daily spiritual praxis models that work
  
• Revisioning our work
  
• Finding spiritual partners
  
• Models of spirituality that do not sacrifice rationality
  
• The Holiness-Wholeness continuum
  
• Spiritual self-assessment tool.