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 – in line with our corporate values – a positive influence on the engagement and development of their employees, and by developing and implementing business strategies together with their teams. These aspects are part of the standard global nomination criteria for leadership positions.
Our leadership culture is based on BASF’s corporate values and 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.
By offering a wide range of targeted training and development opportunities for leaders at all levels, we help to ensure the future viability of BASF. We offer our leaders opportunities for each phase of their career as well as various formats that enable them to learn from one another and from external experts. 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 work, the focus topic Care and Coach for Performance was defined for our leadership training in 2023. We gave leaders impetus to work on the topic of resilience and to further strengthen their role as coaches. These virtual training courses and inspirational events provided senior executives in particular with opportunities for self-reflection, global exchange, practicing and consolidating competencies and skills.
To identify and develop the best talent at an early stage, we also use potential assessments. Among other things, we identify indicators for future leadership success and compare the skills already developed by the talents with the requirements for management tasks with greater responsibility. This enables us to offer even more targeted development opportunities and help to further increase the quality and number of our potential leaders.
Regular feedback plays an important role in the development of leaders. In 2023, we did not make it mandatory to use our global feedback tool FEEDback&forward. Nevertheless, 800 leaders voluntarily used the tool and obtained valuable feedback from their teams. This corresponds to around 10% of our leaders. In 2024, we will make using our leadership feedback tool mandatory again.