Lech L’cha: Role-Modeling Self-Care and a Community of Trust as an Approach to Scaling Success

“The LORD said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.’”

—Genesis 12:1–2

At the Leadership Commons, we design each of our leadership institutes to adapt to particular target audiences. Yet, whether we are training aspiring heads of day schools or newly minted directors of Jewish early childhood education centers, all of our institutes share several core principles. Perhaps the most critical of these is the building of community and the cultivation of self-care through intensive cohort retreat experiences.

Each institute participant, often referred to as a fellow, completes our programs with a cohort of peers. We whisk away cohorts from their “native lands” (i.e. their organizations) to new places physically, intellectually, and spiritually, filling their mental reservoirs with new people, ideas, and skills. Each enters as an Abram, engaging in a journey to become an Abraham, feeling renewed and energized to excel in their work and to be a blessing to others upon their return.

We take great care at our intensives to develop a community of trust and promote high-level self-care, creating the foundation that we feel success rests upon. We foster the scaling of success by nurturing the role modeling that takes place among fellows. We will discuss role modeling in detail a bit later. Let us first examine the importance of this foundation.

Build A Community of Trust

At our retreats, fellows are encouraged to explore ideas freely and openly. Fellows enter our programs with accomplishments and specific successes and we provide forums to share and invite peers to explore how they can adapt each other’s successes in their own shop. In addition, fellows receive timely, judgment-free feedback that nurtures a culture of healthy experimentation and failing forward.  This all builds communal trust.

In addition, the first retreat in all of our institutes, which typically span 1-2 years and multiple retreats, not only focus on building a strong community of peers, they also set the stage for how one practices self-care to become a sustainable high performer.

The two of us partner with excellent collaborators at the JCC Association to direct one of our newest institutes, the JCC Leadership Training Institute (JCCLTI), preparing talented and accomplished mid-level JCC professionals who work throughout the continent to assume the high-responsibility and often stress-inducing executive roles at JCCs. JCC executives are trusted to ensure their center meets its broad mission, nurtures innovation, maintains financial health, and provides an overall high-quality experience for users and staff. It’s a tall order. Thus, our starting point is to invest in practices to nurture their physical, psychological, and spiritual health.

Invest in Self-Care

At our first program retreat, we partnered with TIGNUM (“beam” in Latin), the firm that selected JCCLTI as their non-profit partner program for 2018. TIGNUM’s philosophy is that while every organization, and indeed every person, may have a slightly different structure, we all need a strong foundation of support, or beam, that will allow us to function at a sustainable high-performance–level of work.

TIGNUM focuses on four areas: mindset, movement, nutrition, and recovery, outlined in Jogi Rippel’s and Scott Peltin’s book, Sink, Float, or Swim. Chiefly, we practice and promote during our retreats a positive mindset. A positive mindset is a healthy way of thinking that gives us the best chance to produce successful results. It is also a thinking process that is in direct alignment with realizing success. We also learn together a ritual of movements to perform throughout the day, as well as healthy nutrition, and schedule time for recovery. In particular, we stress movement. We teach easy self-massage techniques to do at one’s desk, going on a midday walk, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator. We cannot begin to scale up ideas unless we have the stability, energy, and focus for the hard work it takes. Therefore, increasing our metabolism, raising our heart rate, and improving strength helps us get there. We also model the essentials of the other TIGNUM areas at our retreats, including providing healthy food and drink and building recovery time into our schedule (more on recovery below). In doing so, we are modeling that leaders of Jewish organizations can be high-energy, intentional, enthusiastic people primed for effective leadership. We then encourage and provide tools for fellows to continue and embrace these practices after they return home.

Strengthen Ourselves Together: Role Modeling

This translation of the V’ahavta prayer commands us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind with all your strength and all your being . . . teach them faithfully.”

At our retreats, fellows learn from our facilitators, yet the most important learning is when they share their own ideas and challenges with each other. By sharing with their like-minded peers to whom they relate and are beginning to trust, they inspire one another. For example, our cohort craved ideas on how to improve the effectiveness of their time, part of working in a positive mindset. We learned strategies to set our daily tasks, lead meetings with intentionality, and eliminate time wasters and traps. As the cohort modeled these ideas and shared their own with each other, they gave each other energy toward a healthy and productive use of time. Their sharing and role-modeling to each other feeds the notion that we can all achieve our goals with a positive mindset. We then encourage fellows to model the mindset concepts to staff and lay leadership at their JCC, spreading the ideas so they go viral.

With role modeling, fellows also give each other a permission to create change. As Maimonides states in his Eight Levels of Tzedakah, “The greatest level, above which there is no greater, is to support a fellow Jew by endowing them with a gift or loan, or entering into a partnership with them, or finding employment for them, in order to strengthen their hand so that they will not need to be dependent upon others.”

It can be challenging for organizations to implement new initiatives or scale up success; as it is easy to remain stuck in their habits. Yet, in JCCLTI, we thrive on pursuing change. We change our behaviors, whether it is in how we run meetings, how we engage in healthy communication strategies with others, or how we collaborate, to meet our performance goals with fellows cheering each other on. We give each other the permission to discover what we can do differently and better. Creating change in one’s personal practices too, being more intentional about what we eat, how much we sleep, and our movement during a workday, impacts our professional work in many areas. The “gift or loan,” in this case, is the development of partnership, creating relationships at the retreats with each other and our respective organizations that encourage and celebrate change.

Finally, role modeling in a community of trust creates accountability. Fellows hold each other accountable, for example, to take time to recover. We cannot sustain high performance if we do not power down regularly. We discussed at our retreat how to reexamine our Jewish professional schedules and behaviors. We recognize and validate the challenges in prioritizing all that we must accomplish in a workweek. Many JCCLTI fellows are also “on” during Shabbat and Jewish holidays. Though Shabbat and many of these holidays are built-in Jewish time for recovery, between entertaining and preparing for all of the holiday events in our calendar, it still feels like work. Thus, we role model recovery at our retreats, scheduling individual time to do what each fellow needs to recover and re-energize. Recovery is also important for learning, so we prioritize time for reflection. We schedule time to further develop relationships and share insights and best practices to break down the material presented, which helps our learning stick.

By role-modeling high level self-care and a community of trust that gives peers permission to change and creates accountability, our fellows are better positioned, encouraged, and skilled to adapt and scale up those programs or initiatives they may learn from their JCC peers or build up what is already working in their own shop. Our fellows can then role-model these new behaviors and ideas to their staff and users back in their “native lands,” (i.e. their JCC). Each fellow can model giving permission to change and hold colleagues accountable for the changes they aspire to make. Role-modeling self-care and a community of trust can extend sustainable high-performance behaviors further, which can nurture success in Jewish communities throughout the continent.

Role-modeling behaviors and ideas fellows learn on their journeys away, as well as the relationships they form, can help spread the energy and thoughts necessary to help the journey of the Jewish people, and people of all faiths who engage in our communities, to new successes and heights. This is a blessing to us all.

 

Beth Garfinkle Hancock (DS ’03) is the program manager of the JCC Leadership Training Institute, a partnership between the Leadership Commons at The William Davidson School and JCC Association.

Mark S. Young is the managing director of the Leadership Commons at The William Davidson School, and part of the faculty planning team of the JCC Leadership Training Institute.