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 regularly 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 by developing and implementing business strategies in line with our corporate values. These aspects 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 our expectations of leadership conduct. 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 and local offerings are optimally coordinated. We aim to develop leaders who lead their teams with professional competence, optimism, empathy and trust, and in this way, create a competitive advantage for BASF.
In order to further anchor the CORE Leadership Values in day-to-day life, two focus topics were defined for our leadership training in 2022: Continuous Meaningful Conversations and Inclusive Leadership. These virtual training courses comprised a series of modules that provided senior executives with opportunities for self-reflection, global exchange, and practicing and consolidating competencies and skills. Since summer 2022, we have also offered other management levels training and information on Continuous Meaningful Conversations and a deep dive into the CORE Leadership Values.
Regular feedback also plays an important role in leadership development. In order to better reflect the anchoring of leadership values in daily leadership conduct, we have enhanced and refined our global feedback tool, FEEDback&forward. In 2022, more than 69,700 employees took advantage of the opportunity to provide feedback to their leader on topics such as trust, empathy, empowerment, innovation and priority setting. Employees were also able to give feedback to their supervisors on the type of leadership behavior they would like to see in the future. In 2022, the majority of our leaders again received positive feedback, which shows that they also meet the high standards BASF requires from them in their day-to-day leadership behavior. The fact that 70% of our leaders have, in the eyes of their employees, further improved their leadership over the past year also points to a clear positive trend. In this way, FEEDback&forward promotes regular and open dialog between employees and leaders and encourages them to reflect on themselves and their own performance. This enables teams to drive forward change together.