In this article, the authors draw parallels between team development and mountain climbing emphasizing the need for tools such as CCL’s TeamVantage™ assessment. CCL’s TeamVantage™ assessment acts as a powerful tool for teams, helping them identify and enhance leadership outcomes such as Direction, Alignment, and Commitment (DAC)™. The paper, based on data from over 480 senior leaders and their teams, underscores the importance of various factors predicting team effectiveness. Key findings emphasize the role of psychological safety, group qualities, influence processes, and leadership outcomes in predicting team effectiveness.
The authors provide four key insights for leaders. First, psychological safety is a dominant predictor of leadership outcomes, underscoring the importance of creating a safe environment for psychological risk-taking. Second, additional group qualities, such as identity and conflict management, complement psychological safety in predicting DAC. Third, the research identifies three distinct patterns of influence within teams (i.e., “captains”, “collaborators”, and “partners”), each yielding different outcomes of leadership. Fourth, each leadership outcome uniquely predicts aspects of team effectiveness, with direction linked to thriving, alignment to performance and satisfaction, and commitment to learning.
