It’s concerning how many businesses aren’t aware of their obligations under the ISO 45003:2021 international standards on managing psychosocial health and safety risks in the workplace. In many jurisdictions like Australia, some companies remain oblivious to Workplace Health Safety (WHS) laws that state a business must manage the risk of psychosocial hazards in the workplace.
While there are plenty of risk consultants who provide advice and a ton of published work on the causes and interventions, there are very few predictive tools for one of the obvious reasons for poor psychosocial safety—ineffective and toxic leadership. A big part of psychosocial well-being at work is people having meaningful purpose and clear direction—knowing where they’re going and what they’re achieving.
Unfortunately, too many leaders can’t balance the drive to get results with maintaining the psychosocial safety of their people. As they push harder for results, they create more fear, anxiety, ambiguity, and conformity (while some think conformity is a good thing… it’s not). Our analysis of 314 leaders around the world indicates there are three ways to ensure your leaders can get shit done without being toxic:
#1 – Make sure they’ve got the personality to drive results in the situations they lead in. There are lots of personality tests ranging from pseudoscience to collective views of what people think they do or wish they did. If you use a personality test to select or assess leadership capability, check its scientific accuracy – is it testing a leader’s innate personality and ability to function in high-pressure environments, and is it based on sound science?
TOP TIP: Type ‘How scientifically accurate is (insert personality test)’ into your web browser and see what third-party sources reveal.
#2 – Check they have the values and motivations to moderate their drive to ‘get shit done’ at any cost. Once you're confident that your chosen assessment accurately reveals a leader's personality and capacity to perform under pressure, the next crucial step is evaluating their inner compass. Do their values and motivations guide their drive toward collaboration, open communication, and genuine commitment? Or does their uncontained drive lead to anxiety, ambiguity, and conformity amongst their team?
TOP TIP: Check your chosen assessment takes a scientific approach to testing values and motivations such as morality, sincerity, fairness, and modesty - not just people’s opinions about the leader’s qualities. If it can’t, reconsider using it.
#3 – Make sure the people you’re testing are telling the truth! There is a lot of confusion in the assessment space about the difference between ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ and honesty and truth-telling. Validity and reliability tell you whether the test is measuring what it claims to measure and if it is relevant to certain situations. Most tests achieve this by asking questions with ‘high face validity’ – meaning it is obvious what the question is asking about, which can give people a clear path to ‘gaming’ the test and giving the ‘right’ answers. Many tests try to solve this by doing 360-degree testing, which adds different opinions and perspectives but doesn’t tell you who is telling the truth.
TOP TIP: Check if your chosen assessment tests whether the responder is telling the truth! It should test for randomness, consistency, and overly positive and negative responses. Many potentially toxic leaders are smart enough to give the ‘right’ answers, so if your chosen assessment can’t detect this, reconsider using it.
In conclusion, as things get more complex and uncertain, leaders need to be even better at managing the balance of delivering results and keeping their people safe. Leaders need a unique blend of personality, values, and motivation to be effective without being toxic to do this. Boards, CEOs, WHS experts, Recruiters, and People & Culture teams need to be able to accurately measure innate personality and values and ensure honest responses so they mitigate the legislative and commercial risk of poor psychosocial safety.
To test if your leaders can get shit done while keeping people safe, take The GreyScale assessment and talk to us.
