From Individual Talent to Collective Capacity

Leadership development often starts with the individual. Yet so many of our greatest opportunities — and our greatest risks — live in how we lead together. The Collective Leadership Assessment (CLA) gives teams and organizations a shared mirror for that “we.”

It’s not simply about one person’s style. It’s about how the group shows up. How the system functions. How the whole leadership “ecosystem” either amplifies or limits performance.

Why We Use It

When we bring the CLA into a leadership engagement, we're looking to shift focus from you (the leader) to us (the group). Because even the best individual leader can hit a ceiling if the collective dynamic isn’t aligned.

A few situations where the CLA becomes particularly relevant:

• The leadership team is clear on role, mission and strategy — but something still feels fragmented, disconnected or flat.

• You want to shift culture, but realize that individual development alone won’t move the needle.

• You’re preparing a team for the next level — and you need more than skill‑building. You need systemic clarity.

• You want to see the gap between how people experience the leadership system today and how that system needs to evolve tomorrow.

The CLA helps you ask: How are we showing up together? Where’s the hidden tension? What’s keeping us from the next leap?

What It Measures

The CLA assesses the collective effectiveness of a team or organization through a robust framework:

• It covers 31 distinct dimensions of leadership effectiveness. 

• Those dimensions roll up into 8 summary domains and further into overarching measures such as Creative vs. Reactive and Relationship vs. Task balance. 

• Critically, it asks: “What is the current reality?” and “What is the ideal/desirable reality?” The gap between those offers strategic developmental insight. 

• It’s designed to surface both behavior and mindset — not just what you do, but how the collective thinks, relates, and flourishes.

How We Use It

When we decide together that the CLA fits your program, the process unfolds with intention:

• Anchoring the work: We clarify the team or organization’s mandate, context, and why “collective leadership” is the lever worth pulling now.

• Assessment deployment: The survey goes out to relevant stakeholders (leadership team, direct reports, other teams or units as appropriate). It’s comprehensive yet designed for usability. 

• Debrief and sense‑making: We facilitate a conversation with the team around the results: What surprised us? What patterns emerged? What is the story behind the numbers?

• Translation to action: The insights don’t sit in a report — they shape a roadmap for growth: changing how the leadership system works, improving alignment, tackling root causes, and building collective capacity.

• Follow‑through and evolution: Because collective leadership is dynamic, we return to the “gap” in subsequent cycles — tracking how the team evolves and what new thresholds emerge.

In short: the CLA helps transform the conversation from “How do I lead better?” to “How do we create real, sustained leadership effectiveness together?”