Leading the Business

Leading the business requires vision. As a leader of an EBSCO business, it’s important to take time to think and plan in order to effectively work on your business, in addition to working in your business. At this level, you will leverage strategic thought to create a vision for the company which reflects its growth potential and can be integrated into individual and team goals at every level. You will provide a transparent and compelling vision of the business’ future that engages and energizes your teams and keeps stakeholders informed about the progress. You must be mindful of your influence and set a standard for respect, adaptability, humility, and eagerness to learn. It is crucial that you not only demonstrate steadfastness and focus, but also a willingness to embrace, communicate, and encourage change when it is necessary to move the business forward. Your vision will enable continuous improvement.

Self Assessment Tool: Click this link to access the “Leading the Business” tool designed to help you identify your current strengths and growth opportunities.

Areas of Focus Competencies LEADING THE BUSINESS
PERSONAL Positive Attitude Positive Realism: Communicates optimistically and enthusiastically about business opportunities and our future while acknowledging challenges and avoiding wishful thinking.
Solution-Focused: Boldly tackles complex issues; helps others envision what can be; makes tough or unpopular decisions in a timely way and ensures others do as well.
Composure: Models steadiness, focus, and calm under pressure; strikes a balance between healthy self-confidence and appropriate humility.
Trust and Respect Ethics and Values: Demonstrates, promotes, and reinforces an uncompromising commitment to high standards of ethical behavior and the EBSCO Way.
Trust: Inspires trust by sharing information appropriately, taking a clear stand on important issues, and following through on commitments; deals with others in an open, honest manner; extends trust to others.
Respect: Treats others fairly and with respect for their talents and differences; assumes positive intent; puts systems, policies, and procedures in place to ensure fairness in employee relations and business dealings.
Drive Determination and Resilience: Models a determined focus and will to succeed that is contagious; handles adversity well, recovers quickly, and sustains drive over the long haul.
High Expectations: Establishes stretch goals for the business; creates a dynamic culture of high expectations, high performance standard, and achievement.
Urgency: Sets the expectation that leaders will act swiftly to address issues and opportunities facing our employees and customers.
PEOPLE Collaboration Partnering: Promotes the importance of collaboration within and across our businesses to create, capture, share, and maximize value.
Interpersonal Effectiveness: Interacts effectively with others; is considerate and approachable; values, respects, and welcomes differences and others’ perspectives; is mindful of own authority and personal impact.
Conflict Management: Is not afraid to surface and address conflict directly; acts as a barrier buster where necessary.
Open Communication Direction: Conveys a compelling picture of the organization’s future that engages and energizes employees at all levels.
Influence: Consistently seeks to engage, excite, and influence a broad range of stakeholders about EBSCO’s future direction, strategies, and decisions by

connecting it to “what’s in it for them;” values input, is eager to understand, and can be influenced by others.
Empowerment: Seeks input and involves others in decisions that affect them; effectively delegates and drives decisions downward.
Talent Development Personal Development: Demonstrates keen insight into own strengths, opportunities, and impact on others; leads the way in self-improvement.
Talent Development: Identifies current and future talent needs, assesses strengths and gaps, and puts development strategies in place across the business to accelerate readiness and build bench strength.
Diversity: Sets and reinforces organizational norms and practices that respect, value, and leverage differences to achieve better results.
THOUGHT Critical Thinking Analysis: Analyzes complex problems fully and objectively before taking action; able to draw logical conclusions from available data; gets at the root cause of issues.
Complexity: Thinks systemically; understands and works through complexity; considers competing issues, benefits, and risks; recognizes connections between issues that aren’t obviously related.
Sound Judgment: Balances decisiveness with patience; navigates ambiguity; recognizes personal biases and assumptions; makes well-reasoned decisions.
Strategic Thinking Business Acumen: Understands our business model and the evolving business environment; has a strong P&L perspective; uses data to measure and analyze business performance, manage risk, and make decisions.
Big-Picture Thinking: Identifies the business implications of changing conditions, patterns, and trends; develops strategies to seize new market, customer, and business opportunities.
Global Mind-set: Thinks and acts, where appropriate, with a global mindset. Considers differences across cultures, geographies, and markets when shaping business strategies, decisions, and practices.
Customer- Focused Customer Insight: Anticipates changes in the marketplace and helps others understand customer needs, especially in emerging, vertical, or other growth markets.
Customer Value: Focuses all aspects of the business on delivering increased value to customers as a competitive advantage; ensures strategic plans include addressing unmet customer needs.
Responsiveness: Encourages others to find new ways to leverage enterprise resources and expertise to drive improvements and otherwise distinguish the EBSCO customer experience.
RESULTS Change Leadership Vision: Communicates the need for change; paints a compelling picture of where we want to end up and the benefits of getting there.
Engagement: Involves key stakeholders to gain consensus, broad agreement, and support for needed actions.
Alignment: Aligns organizational structure, systems, and processes to enable, reinforce, and sustain change.
Continuous Improvement Challenge: Challenges leaders across the organization to question the way things are done and to identify original solutions in the face of changing market, customer, and organizational requirements.
Improvement: Ensures that systems and processes are in place to promote disciplined reflection, learning, and improvement in all aspects of our work.
Innovation: Explores new business opportunities and creates an environment that supports and encourages large and small innovations in how we serve our customers and how we work, compete, and win.
Execution Prioritizing and Planning: Establishes clear goals and priorities for the business; translates strategy into action plans; keeps the business focused on the core drivers of profitable growth.
Accountability: Holds self and others accountable for performance goals; does what is needed to ensure the business consistently delivers with excellence.
Follow-Through: Secures the needed external support and resources; monitors progress and provides support as needed to ensure that results are accomplished.