How Successful Is Your Mentoring Program?
| Publication year | 2022 |
| Pages | 06 |
DEPARTMENT
MENTORING MATTERS
Measuring a Program's True Impact
BY J. RYANN PEYTON
The success of a formal mentoring program can be difficult to measure. It largely depends on the users' experience, and user experience varies from person to person and program to program. But indicators of success are almost always required for a mentoring program's growth and sustainability. Stakeholders want to be able to point to tangible impacts to justify the allocation of time and financial resources needed to keep the program operational. After all, "What gets measured gets managed."[1]
Unfortunately, law firms, government law offices, law schools, bar associations, and other legal organizations tend to measure their mentoring program's success incorrectly or not at all. Mo st legal organizations focus on the program's metrics, but the best indicators of a program's success are actually the learning outcomes. Additionally, when programs establish and build on a theory of change in their program development, that theory can lead to improved evaluation and reporting processes as the program matures. This article discusses some practical ways for legal organizations to measure their mentoring program's true impact.
Establishing a Theory of Change A theory of change is an organization's set of beliefs and hypotheses about how its activities lead to outcomes that contribute to a program's overall mission and vision.[2] Often developed during the planning stage of a mentoring program, a theory of change is useful for monitoring and evaluating a mentoring program as it grows and sustains over time. It can help organizations devise better evaluation tools, identify key indicators of success, prioritize areas of data collection, and provide a structure for data analysis and reporting.[3]
Developing a theory of change is a lot like designing a mentoring program. You'll need to:
1.identify the people you're working with (your audience);
2. determine the needs and characteristics of your audience; and
3. establish the program's final goals (what the program aims to achieve for your audience).
A program's final goals should be realistic and succinct, forward looking and relatively long-term, and engaging for stakeholders. You should set no more than a few final goals, and it is often best to set just one.
Many legal organizations struggle to articulate appropriate and actionable final goals for their mentoring program, and so the goals wind up being too broad or impracticable. For instance, a law firm might focus on "improving outcomes" for program participants in areas such as employment prospects, practice competencies, and leadership potential. While noble in spirit, these final goals are overly broad, and the correlation of the mentoring program to the outcomes is nearly impossible to measure. Presumably after some time in the legal profession, every lawyer will have improved employment prospects, practice competencies, and leadership potential. The mentoring program’s impact on these outcomes may be tangential at best.
Or a bar association might focus on "elevating opportunity" for lawyers from communities that have been...
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