Management and Leadership

As a global business operating with staff in over 30 countries, a network of some 1,500 suppliers and an order book of more than 3,600 aircraft, the management and leadership challenge at Airbus is enormous.

Our ability to meet that challenge is business-critical. This is why the integration of Management and Leadership skills has been identified as a strategic key competency which enables us to provide a consistent approach across our operations, from the executive committee to line and business managers.

We have developed a company wide strategy to ensure that our managers are identified, developed and assessed to a global standard. The objective for us is to maximise our managers’ ability to effectively engage with all staff in order to drive and deliver against business performance objectives.

Some of the key elements of this strategy include:

Leading by example

Given the continual evolution of the Airbus business model and challenges faced (for example, the future of the industry as a whole, strategies for what we make and buy, our global footprint, lean implementation, outsourcing, regulatory environment, etc.), our managers are increasingly required to show direction and lead by example. They need to make difficult decisions in the interests of Airbus and EADS and take  responsibility for them.

Equipped to perform

We ask a great deal of our managers but, at the same time, we ensure they are equipped to perform to the best of their ability. We are clear about what we expect of them. We give them the very best training to develop their expertise, and we have well-developed and validated processes to assess, challenge and support them in their leadership and management tasks.

Management expertise

Focusing initially on our top 2,000 managers worldwide, we are mapping competencies and using this to develop a complete profile for all managers and team leaders across the organisation. This will help us to identify where there are gaps that we need to fill and to focus our development strategy.

Just as a technical expert requires specialist skills, so does a manager. Therefore, inherent in our strategy is the development of specialist management expertise, and a management career path as an option to a technical expert career path.