Adam Levine
Associate Professor of Government
Cornell University
President of research4impact

 

Adam Levine will be presenting a talk on  "How do you inspire new civic leaders? A field experiment on the impact of mentoring."

 

Abstract: Leaders are vital in civic and political life. The success of social movements, civic associations, and community organizations depends upon people who voluntarily choose to take responsibility for projects outside their comfort zone. What motivates people to become leaders? Previous work from a variety of disciplines highlights the value of one-on-one mentoring, and provides numerous case studies describing how it can work and why it’s important. Yet we lack much causal evidence. Here I report the results of research designed to estimate the impact of mentoring on the likelihood that people become leaders. The design includes both ethnography and a field experiment. First, I leverage my own participant observation along with research on the psychology of relationship-building to design a mentoring intervention. Then I collaborate with an international NGO to test that intervention as part of a larger training program in Kenya and Mexico in 2018. What results is a nuanced picture of some of the key techniques of mentoring along with one estimate of their impact. In addition, because this research was a collaboration with an NGO I also discuss the benefits of these findings from their perspective, including the value of naming mentoring techniques and calculating a return-on-investment.