What Makes Us Different
The GreyScale (TGS) assessment is designed for 21st-century leadership, encompassing gender balance and diversity. TGS also stands apart in four other ways:
Dark Personalities: TGS uniquely measures traits linked to the five dark personalities, going beyond the well known dark triad, that are crucial for leadership, but potentially toxic if uncontained. It offers actionable insights to enhance leadership effectiveness and mitigate toxicity
Leadership Toxicity: TGS identifies potential leadership toxicity by assessing the impact of personality on four critical psychosocial risk factors, ASCA. These factors influence team well-being and performance, aligning with global occupational health and safety regulations
Assessment Authenticity: TGS detects 99% of inauthentic responses using scales for consistency, randomness, and deception, ensuring integrity and preventing manipulation
Practical Outcomes: TGS delivers practical, useful outcomes to improve leadership effectiveness and reduce toxicity
By integrating these elements, TGS provides a comprehensive tool for developing balanced, effective, and safe leadership in the modern workplace, offering tangible benefits for your organization
Why We're Essential
TGS is critical to organizations by ensuring compliance with psychological health and safety (PHS) regulations and enhancing leadership selection and development.
Through its proprietary ASCA framework, TGS identifies potential leadership toxicity, reducing risks of fines, claims, and productivity losses while safeguarding employee well-being and boosting your organization's reputation.
Effective leadership selection and development is essential for a positive culture, driving engagement, attracting talent, and enhancing performance. TGS provides insights into leaders' personalities and their impact on ASCA, fostering a productive and sustainable workplace.
Investing in TGS enhances PHS compliance, leadership effectiveness, and overall organizational success.
Effective leaders thrive in stressful situations, handle complexity and ambiguity, and manage challenges with minimal anxiety. These abilities often stem from dark personality traits. However, if uncontained, these traits can be toxic, impacting the four critical psychosocial risk factors—Anxiety, Stimulation, Conformity, and Ambiguity (ASCA)—leading to unhealthy work environments, reduced morale, decreased performance, and high staff turnover.
TGS is critical as it helps identify effective and toxic personality combinations in leaders, providing insights into their impact on people and performance. Our research shows leaders are born, but effective leaders are made through self-awareness and managing strengths and weaknesses.
Recruiters must provide thoroughly vetted candidate's for leadership roles, as effective leaders drive success by shaping culture, strategy, and performance. Poor vetting can lead to leadership failures, decreased morale, business disruption, and damaged reputations, significantly impacting both the recruitment firm and the client. 75% of firms use personality tests for senior roles, but candidate misrepresentation is common, resulting in poor hires and increased workplace risks.
The TGS assessment is critical as it solves this by detecting 99% of inauthentic responses through consistency, randomness, and deception scales.
TGS ensures candidate's are genuine, preventing destructive individuals from infiltrating organizations and providing effective leadership.
Our Team
Our Journey
We have been on a seven-year journey to design, validate, and launch an assessment designed for 21st-century leadership. One that encompasses genuine diversity and addresses several other core issues with existing leadership assessments. Welcome to The GreyScale, a new way of assessing leaders' effectiveness, toxicity, and authenticity
2017
Dr. Paul Phillips, Vicki McLean & Peter Griffith establish TGS Leadership
We met at a leadership conference, and although we came from different backgrounds, we shared a common frustration: Leadership assessment, a $13 billion industry, still relies on outdated 1920s methods despite the fact leadership has evolved dramatically with market dynamics, gender equality, diversity, workplace culture, and changing regulations.
Most assessments lack deep insights into a leader's personality, don't check authenticity, fail to address toxic leadership, and ignore the science around the impact of dark personalities on leadership effectiveness.
We founded The GreyScale to provide a modern, science-based assessment that addresses today's complex leadership challenges.
2018
TGS Launches beta-test and assesses an initial cohort of 273 leaders
Leveraging Paul's expertise in psychological assessments and our combined experience working with thousands of leaders around the world, we created The GreyScale to assess the level of dark personality traits that contribute to leadership effectiveness as well as toxicity - Borderline, Machiavellian, Narcissism, Psychopath, and Sociopath.
Our beta test of 273 leaders identified 'goldilocks zones' where a leader's dark personality traits are highly effective in specific situations.
We also identified the dangerous levels where leaders become toxic and negatively impact the psychological safety of their people.
2021
Update to TGS reporting featuring combinations data. 42 more leaders tested.
Further analysis of our beta test results identified how a leader's virtues, motivations, attachments, and ego defenses amplify or contain their dark personality - enhancing their effectiveness or toxicity in certain situations.
We mapped 11 psychological 'containment factors', including morality, defensiveness, modesty, and fairness to leadership personalities.
This helped us identify 'winning' and 'risky' combinations of personality and containment factors that make leaders highly effective or highly toxic in specific workplace situations.
We tested this new reporting function with 42 leaders.
2023
Kristian Barnes appointed as CEO to drive next stage of product design and growth
At this stage of our journey, we realized the need for a CEO to develop and implement an effective go-to-market strategy.
We brought Kristian on board due to his proven experience in scaling start-ups and global business and his academic background - an MSc in psychology and published work in leadership and mental health. This allowed the Founders to focus on innovation and product development, maintaining our core vision, values, and unique value proposition.
Kristian focuses on driving growth in our global markets and steering the company toward long-term success.
2024
The GreyScale launches globally
Seven years after we conceived the idea of a better way to assess leadership effectiveness, authenticity, and toxicity, we officially launched The GreyScale Assessment globally.
We partnered with Timedoor to develop a next-generation website and user interface that embodies our vision of modern leadership assessment. This marks a significant step in our journey to provide a modern, effective, and science-based assessment tailored to today's complex leadership challenges.
In the coming months, we will announce new products designed to support modern leaders and leadership in organizations further.
2017
Dr. Paul Phillips, Vicki McLean & Peter Griffith establish TGS Leadership
We met at a leadership conference, and although we came from different backgrounds, we shared a common frustration: Leadership assessment, a $13 billion industry, still relies on outdated 1920s methods despite the fact leadership has evolved dramatically with market dynamics, gender equality, diversity, workplace culture, and changing regulations.
Most assessments lack deep insights into a leader's personality, don't check authenticity, fail to address toxic leadership, and ignore the science around the impact of dark personalities on leadership effectiveness.
We founded The GreyScale to provide a modern, science-based assessment that addresses today's complex leadership challenges.
2018
TGS Launches beta-test and assesses an initial cohort of 273 leaders
Leveraging Paul's expertise in psychological assessments and our combined experience working with thousands of leaders around the world, we created The GreyScale to assess the level of dark personality traits that contribute to leadership effectiveness as well as toxicity - Borderline, Machiavellian, Narcissism, Psychopath, and Sociopath.
Our beta test of 273 leaders identified 'goldilocks zones' where a leader's dark personality traits are highly effective in specific situations.
We also identified the dangerous levels where leaders become toxic and negatively impact the psychological safety of their people.
2021
Update to TGS reporting featuring combinations data. 42 more leaders tested.
Further analysis of our beta test results identified how a leader's virtues, motivations, attachments, and ego defenses amplify or contain their dark personality - enhancing their effectiveness or toxicity in certain situations.
We mapped 11 psychological 'containment factors', including morality, defensiveness, modesty, and fairness to leadership personalities.
This helped us identify 'winning' and 'risky' combinations of personality and containment factors that make leaders highly effective or highly toxic in specific workplace situations.
We tested this new reporting function with 42 leaders.
2023
Kristian Barnes appointed as CEO to drive next stage of product design and growth
At this stage of our journey, we realized the need for a CEO to develop and implement an effective go-to-market strategy.
We brought Kristian on board due to his proven experience in scaling start-ups and global business and his academic background - an MSc in psychology and published work in leadership and mental health. This allowed the Founders to focus on innovation and product development, maintaining our core vision, values, and unique value proposition.
Kristian focuses on driving growth in our global markets and steering the company toward long-term success.
2024
The GreyScale launches globally
Seven years after we conceived the idea of a better way to assess leadership effectiveness, authenticity, and toxicity, we officially launched The GreyScale Assessment globally.
We partnered with Timedoor to develop a next-generation website and user interface that embodies our vision of modern leadership assessment. This marks a significant step in our journey to provide a modern, effective, and science-based assessment tailored to today's complex leadership challenges.
In the coming months, we will announce new products designed to support modern leaders and leadership in organizations further.
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 to improve leadership candidate suitability.