When I joined the newly formed ProCredit Academy team in 2006, I was soon asked not only to create individual workshops and seminars for future managers, but ultimately to help build a complete course program consisting of 38 courses spanning over a three-year period until the program's completion. By the time I left the company in October 2022, 15 generation of participant groups, and thus approximately 600 students, have successfully completed the program. These talented individuals have long represented the functional and ideal core of the group in leading positions as managers, department heads, team and project leaders and specialists.

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In 2006, the ProCredit group represented an international banking group consisting of twenty fairly young institutions on three continents, all of which operated in the microfinance sector. When I started, the number of employees had just passed the 20,000 mark. The Academy was established to provide a learning and development venue for both junior management and the institutions themselves. The newly established campus was to provide the much-needed cultural integration to put the company on its own authentic cultural footing. Both the concrete formulation of the basic ethical, entrepreneurial and political principles of this culture and the teaching of them actually took place to a large extent at the Academy.    

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These were exciting times because the goals were ambitious and the room for experimentation enormous. Apart from the expected objectives of an executive training program, such as teaching and synchronizing banking and financial knowledge, as well as training essential management skills, the course program invested a lot of time and attention in building a core group of actual and future managers who would share the key principles of a common corporate culture. A challenging task of integration and transformation, considering the extremely diverse cultural backgrounds of the participants from Europe, Latin America and Africa.

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Our approach was based on two fundamental ideas:

First, participants in the academic program spend considerable time together, a total of 34 weeks on the campus in Germany. They form stable learning groups and build friendships, share experiences from their cultural contexts, and ultimately become bearers of a distinct, shared corporate identity. In addition, as part of this integration process, participants become more culturally aware and tolerant, breaking out of their previous conditioning in more closed societies. As future managers, they thus become role models and multipliers who can convincingly exemplify and represent the ethical values of an open and liberal society in their daily actions.

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In retrospect, after 17 years of practical experience, it can be said that this part of the program has worked extremely well. The generations of graduating participants have built stable networks across all cultural and even divisive political boundaries. What unites them is the "Academy experience," which to this day is an important part of the motivation for many employees and even freshly recruited talent to apply for the very time-consuming and demanding training program.

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The second central idea was to open up the course program to topics from the humanities and social and natural sciences, such as history, philosophy, economics, but also anthropology or neuroscience. We have linked a number of learning objectives to this, knowing full well that we are entering uncharted territory:

• participants are challenged with unexpected topics and issues and thus accustomed to become curious, flexible and open-minded in their professional approach and learning behavior;

• we train essential critical and analytical thinking skills as key components of managers and specialists working for financial institutions with ambitious development goals;

• by imparting and discussing sound knowledge about the social and intellectual development of humanity, participants will be enabled to develop reasonable and informed opinions and positions on a wide range of issues, and to advocate them confidently

 

Ultimately, participants should use this part of the course program to discover for themselves the history of human development and philosophy, to broaden their intellectual horizons in order to emancipate themselves and ultimately to become bearers of an enlightened corporate culture that is liberal in the best sense of the word. The concept of liberalism, as we use it, is based on the image of human individuals elaborated during the European Enlightenment:

• rationally thinking,

• emotionally competent and empathetic,

• morally responsible for one's own decisions and actions,

• respecting others as equal bearers of basic rights

• individualistic with knowledge of dependence on and a sense of the needs of society

 

I will provide a more detailed assessment of the benefits and potential effects of social science and humanities topics on corporate learning and the establishment of a corporate culture in a separate article in my blog. 

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As a trainer and coach, I have grown with the challenge of dealing with a very heterogeneous group of learners who, especially during the early days of the program, viewed the scientific digressions and topics as exotic and sometimes irrelevant to their professional development. A skeptical target group is the ultimate challenge for a trainer! If you manage to introduce the philosophy of the Enlightenment to predominantly pragmatically thinking managers of banks, and they end up continuing their intense discussions about Kant's categorical imperative during breaks and evenings even without the trainer's intervention, anything seems possible.

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What ultimately contributed to the success of the program was a large methodological toolkit designed to ensure the basic principle of constant participation and interaction in classrooms. It sounds almost too banal or simple to emphasize, but we were confronted, especially in the beginning, with a strong bias of authoritarian school and university educational systems that had to be overcome. We wanted to create a learning atmosphere that was thought-provoking and participatory, and to establish an inclusive culture of discussion to encourage and empower participants to emerge as agents of action. Encouraging and even enforcing active participation of participants through a wide range of methods such as discussions, debates, presentations, group projects, role plays, and even business games became a regular routine in all courses. In addition, we indirectly influenced the behavior and development of our participants through ongoing evaluation by measuring the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of participation and making them the subject of feedback and development discussions. Mere listening or only silent participation in the courses was not accepted. Our coaching efforts were aimed at offering ways and assistance to activate oneself as a participant in order to actually benefit from the learning offered.