In 2009, I took over management responsibility for the Academy as Managing Director, combining my teaching and coordination responsibilities for the course program with classic management tasks. From now on I was responsible for a team of thirty employees and a training center with space for more than a hundred students.

 

The management position was not on my wish list, in fact I was happy with my role as trainer, coach and program coordinator. The opportunity to build a team consisting of local staff, some international instructors and external course providers, and thus also to help shape my own work environment, was then much too attractive not to do it. In addition, this position also involved an enormous influence on the content direction and positioning of the Academy as a central place for the development not only of courses but also of the formulation of the purposes and goals of the continuing education programs of the group as a whole.

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ProCredit Academy Campus 2019

 

My own approach to leadership and management has had to evolve in practice and adapt to the needs of different teams with different levels of aspiration and expectations. It is perfectly obvious that the functional teams of the academy hotel have different expectations of management than the teaching staff involved in the design and implementation of the course program. The ideal-type models described in the sprawling literature on leadership styles are of limited help in this regard. Ultimately, a mix of delegating, coaching, supporting, and directing has emerged, based on a few key principles:

• Promotion of individual responsibility through active participation

• Motivation and identification through involvement, delegation, and 

• Integration through constant openness and responsiveness as basic communicative virtues of management and leadership.   

An important component of the Academy project was to evaluate and communicate the impact of the training program. It is perfectly obvious that an elaborate and expensive program such as this needs to provide regular evidence of its effectiveness. In the context of such an institutionalized program, as an integral component of a structured training strategy, data on efficiency continue to provide important indications of campus and course utilization, but take a back seat to information on medium- and long-term outcomes and influences of the program.

 

Individual achievements and the development of competencies and skills can, of course, be documented directly by means of performance records or certificates. But how do you describe personality development within a framework of sufficient complexity on the one hand and comprehensibility or meaningfulness on the other? How do you transfer a multitude of subjective, situational observations into a framework that makes development measurable and verifiable?   

 

In order to objectify the subjectivity of the observations as much as possible on the one hand, and to make the complexity of the development goals tangible and comprehensible on the other, we have created an extensive catalog of criteria that describes the individual development of the participants in the areas of social competence, emotional intelligence, leadership potential or work attitude in a structured way. The resulting model is embedded in a proactive coaching approach consisting of active observation in the classroom situations, regular and ad hoc discussion and feedback formats both with the participants themselves and with the responsible managers and HR specialists of the banks. 

 

Ideally, the coaches/trainers and the participants formulated a development agreements that set out expectations and goals at the start of the program and are reviewed and updated at fixed intervals. This is where information from the sending companies and the participants' self-assessment comes in. 

 

Personality profiles were developed from all these pieces of the puzzle. Their structure was always based on the predefined categories and criteria, which responsibly involved the participants as co-authors of their own development and offered the banks' HR departments a substantial basis for their decisions. In this way, we had created an instrument that could holistically document individual development and also opened up the possibility of development control in the ongoing process through regular interventions.      

Since COVID disrupted our face-to-face trainings between March 2020 and February 2021, I successfully advocated for the introduction of a digital LMS that integrated new formats such as live-online trainings and e-learning modules into our educational program. We began transitioning parts of the L&D efforts of all ProCredit institutions onto this platform, creating a venue for sharing and development. The LMS-based professional development offerings have the potential to further individualize training in two ways:

• Employees can select courses and create their own learning paths based on structured suggestions;

• with e-learning modules, learners determine their own learning pace and the timing of their initiatives.  

 

The Academy has thus become an important cornerstone of the Group's HR policy and a hub for L&D-related ideas and projects. In particular, the Academy took on a leading role in the planning, design and implementation of compliance training to anchor the Code of Conduct ideally, as well as additional locally organized ethics courses to drive cultural integration.    
 

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