What We Expect from our Leaders

Our leaders and their teams should contribute to BASF’s success. This is why we promote high-quality leadership and measure its impact. We understand impactful leadership as leaders that serve as role models by having a positive influence on the engagement and development of their employees, and developing and implementing business strategies in line with our corporate values. These expectations are part of the standard global nomination criteria for leadership positions. Our leadership culture is based on BASF’s corporate values: creative, open, responsible and entrepreneurial – CORE.

Our specific expectations of leaders’ conduct are derived from these: The CORE Leadership Values serve as the guiding principles for all leaders and set out BASF’s expectations of leadership behavior. They are aligned with BASF’s strategic goals and reflect our company’s leadership vision.

We offer our leaders a wide variety of learning and development opportunities for each phase of their career as well as various formats that enable them to learn from one another and external experts. Global, regional and local offerings are optimally coordinated. We aim to develop leaders who lead their teams with optimism, empathy and trust, and in this way, create a competitive advantage for BASF.

In order to anchor the CORE Leadership Values in day-to-day life, an in-depth training course – CORE Leadership Upskilling – was offered in 2021. The virtual training comprised a series of modules that encouraged self-reflection and provided opportunities for global dialog. The training modules were initially completed by all senior executives worldwide. Work in small, mixed groups aimed to deepen participants’ understanding of the CORE Leadership Values, enable in-depth discussion of these and expand global networks. Since the fall of 2021, additional leadership levels have undergone training and activities modeled on CORE Leadership Upskilling.

Regular feedback plays an important role in the development of leaders. We have therefore adapted our global feedback tool to enable leaders to, in the future, even better reflect on how these values are anchored in their leadership behavior.

Since 2020, various existing leadership development tools have been converted to virtual formats to optimally support our leaders – including during the challenging times of the coronavirus pandemic.