What is the Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment?

This free suite of resources helps organizations and leaders assess and improve psychological health and safety strategies.  

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The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is a set of free resources to help organizations and leaders assess and address strategies pertaining to psychological health and safety. It is based on the requirement for competent leadership as described in the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace.

Leaders complete a self-assessment which helps identify positive strategies they are currently using consistently as well as those they could implement to promote psychological health and safety.

  • Organization-wide approach - The assessment can be assigned to all or select leaders by an administrator authorized by an organization.
  • Individual leader approach - There is a separate option that allows individual leaders to confidentially take the assessment for their own learning and development.
  • Employee feedback - The optional employee feedback version obtains perspectives from the leader's direct reports. This helps to see whether the employees are aware of the extent to which these strategies are being implemented. Any discrepancy in perception provides an excellent opportunity for team discussion and engagement towards a psychologically safer workplace.

This is not a personality or character assessment. It focuses only on the extent to which strategies known to support psychologically safe work are being implemented.

The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is meant to be part of continual improvement of leaders and can be accessed as many times as desired.

Leadership strategies known to support psychological health and safety

Psychologically safe leader resources are based on the requirement for competent leadership as described in the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (National Standard). These evidence-based tools were developed by Dr. Joti Samra, R.Psych. and her MyWorkplaceHealth.com team with support from the Workplace Strategies for Mental Health team.  

It contains a series of statements ranked by the leader in terms of the extent to which they engage in these strategies. Each strategy can be customized for unique work requirements and situations, such as remote or safety-sensitive work.

The assessment can be assigned to leaders by an administrator authorized by your organization. There’s also a separate option that allows individuals to use the assessment for their personal and confidential learning and development.

Organizations can use these free resources to provide tools and training to support psychologically safe leadership. The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment helps with specific strategies and clear direction.

The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is meant to be part of leaders’ continual improvement and can be accessed as many times as desired. The leader self-assessment and employee feedback version each takes about 20 minutes to complete.

Leaders self-assess against these strategies  

Leaders complete a self-assessment that helps identify positive strategies they’re currently using. They’ll also point out additional strategies known to support a psychologically safer workplace. The results provide clear strategies to improve psychologically safe leadership and many free resources are also available to support action.

Since this is a self-assessment, leaders could potentially mark themselves perfect on each strategy. This wouldn’t offer useful information as it won’t indicate areas for improvement. The Employee feedback version gathers the employees’ perspective on these same strategies. For this reason, the results will be most helpful to the leaders if they’re honest about which strategies they do only some of the time. This will flag potential opportunities for improvement before the employee feedback is collected.

There’s no medical or health information collected. The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is focused only on strategies known to support a psychologically safer work environment.

Employees can share their perception of leadership strategies

The optional Employee feedback version obtains perspectives from the leader's direct reports. This feedback offers information about whether employees are aware of the extent to which these strategies are being implemented. Any discrepancy in perception provides an excellent opportunity for team discussion and engagement towards a psychologically safer workplace. Employee perspectives could differ from the leader because of:

  • A workplace incident like violence or harassment
  • Changes in team dynamic
  • Current conflict
  • Current organizational changes that are difficult for employees
  • Personal health or family issues that impact judgment or observations
  • A previous leader who wasn’t psychologically safe
  • Work overload
  • Lack of clarity about demands 
  • Fear or anxiety about job retention
  • Lack of awareness about what the leader does in confidence

This isn’t a personality or character assessment. It focuses only on the extent to which strategies known to support psychologically safe work are being implemented.

Action plans are developed for continual improvement

Many free resources are provided to assist either individual leaders or organizations to take action towards psychologically safer leadership strategies.

Confidentiality

The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment is hosted on the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety website. They protect the confidentiality of the data entered and only share aggregate information for the purposes of improving this resource.

Where leaders are assigned links to the assessment through their organization, the authorized administrator will be able to see results and share them with authorized senior management.

For leaders who are completing the assessment for their own learning and development, and not assigned by an authorized administrator, the information gathered is confidential.

Contributors include.articlesCanadian Centre for Occupational Health and SafetyDr. Joti SamraMary Ann BayntonWorkplace Strategies team 2007-2021

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