The GreyScale (TGS) is a cutting-edge leadership assessment for 21st-century leaders.
It comprehensively evaluates critical performance personality traits (Borderline, Machiavellian, Narcissistic, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic), providing a clear and detailed picture of a leader's strengths and vulnerabilities. It helps organizations comply with psychological health and safety legislation by identifying leadership risk and toxicity and assessing its impact on the four psychosocial risks - Anxiety, Stimulation, Conformity, and Ambiguity (ASCA). TGS equips you with the knowledge to make informed decisions for a healthier leadership culture, ensuring leadership suitability and authenticity for the right cultural and performance fit.
Find out more details about the assessment below and how it can help you or your organization. Click the 'Take Assessment' button above to take the assessment individually.
Or, as an organization, contact us here.
The assessment consists of 173 questions, and it takes less than 25 minutes to complete.
One of the key ways we are different from other assessments is our ability to ensure respondents are telling the truth. TGS detects 99% of inauthentic responses to prevent destructive psychopaths or other risky and toxic personalities from entering your organization. The assessment results highlight inauthentic results after forensically checking for consistency, randomness, and deception. If there is any concern about authenticity, the participant will be asked to retake the assessment.
Leadership Insights
The TGS Assessment provides several critical and practical insights to help improve leadership effectiveness and performance and reduce risk and toxicity.
Performance Personalities
The performance personalities of Borderline, Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Sociopathy are crucial for effective leadership. They provide traits that enable decisive action, strategic ruthlessness, charismatic confidence, and intense motivation. The GreyScale Assessment identifies these personalities as dynamic (effective/green), diluted (ineffective/amber), or dangerous (risky and toxic/red).
Containment Factors
11 containment factors grouped into Defensiveness, Morality, Relationship Attachment, and Core Motivations, impact leadership effectiveness and performance. These factors mediate or amplify a leader's behavior, making them more or less effective or risky and toxic in certain situations. TGS provides insight into how these factors interact with a leader's personality to shape their impact on people and business performance.
Leadership Assets and Achilles Heels
As a two-tailed assessment, TGS evaluates combinations of performance personalities and containment factors, ranking them by effectiveness. Leaders gain insights into leveraging winning combinations and mitigating losing ones in order to increase their effectiveness and drive success.
Psychosocial Risk (ASCA)
Four forces—anxiety, stimulation, conformity, and ambiguity (ASCA)—impair team effectiveness. Effective leaders manage their ASCA factors and mitigate their impact on others to foster efficient problem-solving and prevent the workplace toxicity that erodes success.
ASCA's Impact on People
If people feel stressed or distressed their personal performance is impacted . Effective leaders mitigate the four disruptive forces—anxiety, stimulation, conformity, and ambiguity (ASCA)—to reduce any workplace toxicity that is creating stress or distress.
ASCA's Impact on Performance
Businesses solve problems to fulfil their purpose. Effective leaders mitigate the four disruptive forces—anxiety, stimulation, conformity, and ambiguity (ASCA)—to create optimal environments for efficient problem-solving performance and driving success.
See a Sample TGS Assessment Report
Curious about what your leadership assessment report will look like? See a Sample Report and discover how The GreyScale provides in-depth insights into your leadership style.
How TGS Can Help You
An effective leader should thrive in stressful situations, deal well with complexity and ambiguity, seem to have little anxiety about tackling difficult challenges, and cope with internal and external volatility and uncertainty. The presence of the performance personality trait combinations underpins this.
However, suppose these same performance personality traits are extreme or not contained. In that case, they can be toxic and risky and negatively impact the four critical psychosocial risk factors— Anxiety, Stimulation, Conformity, and Ambiguity (ASCA) —and create unhealthy work environments, leading to reduced morale, decreased performance, and high staff turnover.
Our research shows that leaders are born, but effective leaders are made. Effective leaders are self-aware, play to their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.
TGS can help you become a more effective leader by giving insight into your effective, toxic and risky personality combinations, and how you impact people and performance
As a board member, psychological health and safety (PHS) regulation compliance by managing psychosocial risk factors is vital for long-term organizational success.
Legal obligations demand strict adherence to these standards, with potential penalties and personal liability for lapses.
Ethically, PHS compliance safeguards employee well-being and enhances organizational reputation, making it more appealing to top talent. Financially, compliance reduces risks associated with fines, costly compensation claims, and productivity losses due to mental health issues. Commitment to PHS compliance is a legal and ethical responsibility and a strategic choice to protect the organization's financial stability and future success.
TGS can help you reduce potential compliance concerns by identifying potential leadership toxicity and risk and demonstrating how the leader's personality combination impacts people and performance through the four critical psychosocial risk factors— Ambiguity, Stimulation, Conformity, and Anxiety (ASCA).
The role of HR in placing the proper leader is crucial.
An effective leader will drive employee engagement, foster a positive work culture, enhance productivity and attract other top talent. Conversely, choosing an ineffective leader can lead to workplace toxicity, resulting in high employee turnover, reduced morale, and decreased performance. Such toxicity damages employees' well-being and harms the organization's reputation, making attracting and retaining top talent difficult.
Therefore, HR's role in selecting effective leaders is critical in shaping a successful, productive, and sustainable workplace environment.
TGS can help you identify potentially effective and toxic leaders as part of your recruitment or development process by providing insights into their winning and risky personality combinations and their impact on the four critical psychosocial risk factors - Anxiety, Stimulation, Conformity and Ambiguity (ASCA) which affects peoples and performance.
Recruiters are responsible for supplying suitable and thoroughly vetted candidate's for leadership positions briefed to them.
Effective leaders drive an organization's success, shaping its culture, strategy, and performance. Inadequate vetting or mismatched candidate's can result in leadership failures, leading to decreased morale, business disruption, and performance. The consequences of a wrong candidate placement are significant, impacting the reputation and bottom line of the recruitment firm and the business where the candidate is placed.
Recruiters must be able to ensure candidate's possess the qualities necessary for effective leadership.
TGS can help catch out the supersmart psychopaths who are gaming the system by detecting 99% of 'inauthentic' responses in the assessment.
Solutions That Meet Your Unique Needs
TGS provides a variety of solutions for individual leaders, business organizations and recruitment firms. Our solutions are built around two assessments - The TGS Core Leadership Assessment and the TGS Team Assessment. These can be used separately or combined together delivering powerful and actionable insights to increase leadership effectiveness; to identify and mitigate leadership toxicity and risk and to improve leadership candidate suitability.