Lead with humanity. Inspire performance that lasts.
Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory is designed to help leaders explore the challenges they face, navigate change and lead their team to performance that lasts. My name is Mark Roach. As Founder & Principal Advisor, I work alongside people who carry real responsibility and who believe that how you lead matters as much as where you are headed. Leaders who are making the connection across work conditions, worker capacity, team productivity, and operational performance.
An organization performs to the limit of what its people are willing to say out loud.
Psychological safety does not travel upward
The top of an organization, whether board or C-suite, sets the conditions for psychological safety. Its influence moves outward, broader and deeper, from summit to shore.
A board’s response or an executive’s reaction to an uncomfortable truth becomes the organization’s rule, whatever the written policy may say. From there it cascades outward.
Board and executive team
set the ceiling
Senior leadership
Reads that response as permission
Management and front-line teams
Carry the pattern outward
The people you serve
Receive the accumulated effect
The system and the state drive performance
Every organization eventually faces the same question: can our people tell us the truth? When they raise a concern, admit a mistake, or challenge a decision, can they trust that the response will be curiosity rather than punishment?
Answering this will depend on two things that are usually considered as one — the system and the state. They are not the same, and the order matters.
The system is a complex structure formed by the organizational design of workplace psychological health and safety policies and procedures, the assessment and identification of workplace safety hazards, and the practice that is built around it through training, quality review, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
The state emerges from the conditions set around the system. How leaders carry that system into daily practice through their routines. The quality of the culture that develops out of that practice along with established team norms. Those collective habits become the state in which productivity and performance quality emerges.
The state is the downstream effect dependent on the quality with which a workplace has identified, managed, and mitigated hazards to mental health and psychological safety in the work itself and in the work environment. It is indicated by how safe a team feels to speak up.
The system — psychological health and safety
The conditions of work that protect or harm mental health: workload, clarity, civility, recognition, support, and eight others. Something an organization designs, resources, audits, and maintains. The National Standard sets out 13 psychosocial factors. It is voluntary guidance, not legislation.
The 13 psychosocial factors are set out in CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 (R2022), the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace.
Enabled through leader routines and team norms
The state — psychological safety
A shared belief within a team that it is safe to take an interpersonal risk: to ask a question, admit a mistake, disagree, or say “I don’t know.” It cannot be installed. It can only be enabled, and then sustained, or eroded by what happens next.
Psychological safety as a construct is Amy Edmondson’s — Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999.
Together, those conditions form culture
Productivity and performance
Where the state holds, improvement becomes continual rather than episodic.
Where it does not, the costs compound quietly: through silence, turnover, avoided risk, slow problem-solving, and decisions taken without the information that mattered most.
What the evidence says
These numbers confirm what many leaders already sense: how people are treated and how an organization performs are not separate questions. They are a reason to start the work to build the system.
Leaders may not need the business case explained to them; it can help to have it assembled. I bring this evidence to build awareness.
The estimated annual cost of poor mental health in Canada, on modelling the authors describe as conservative. About $110 billion is carried by employers, the single largest payer. If the trajectory continues unchecked, the cost is projected to reach $600 billion a year by 2050.
$180 billion a year
Morawczynski, O., Dobson, K., & Howatt, W. (2026). The economic cost of mental health in Canada. CSA Group Public Policy Centre.
About 14 percent of employer mental health spending goes to prevention. The rest flows downstream: disability leave, accommodation, backfill, turnover, and legal or compliance costs.
86 percent is spent after the harm
Morawczynski, O., Dobson, K., & Howatt, W. (2026). The economic cost of mental health in Canada. CSA Group Public Policy Centre.
Median annual return for Canadian employers with a workplace mental health program in place for one year, rising to $2.18 at three years or more. Calculated from seven organizations with sufficient data.
$1.62 to $2.18 returned per dollar
Chapman, S., Kangasniemi, A., Maxwell, L., & Sereneo, M. (2019). The ROI in workplace mental health programs: Good for people, good for business. Deloitte Insights.
Meta-analysis across many teams links psychological safety to team learning and, through it, to performance, most strongly in complex, knowledge-intensive work.
Improved learning and performance
Sanner, B., & Bunderson, J. S. (2015). When feeling safe isn't enough: Contextualizing models of safety and learning in teams. Organizational Psychology Review, 5(3), 224–243.
Google found the same pattern in its own teams: people on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave, bring in more revenue, and are rated effective twice as often by executives.
Twice as often
Rozovsky, J. (2015). The five keys to a successful Google team. re:Work, Google.
These figures matter because of what sits behind them: your people, and the performance that follows from how they are treated.
The question worth asking is what your own numbers would say and whether you know how safe your people feel.
Where the law sits
In 2013, Canada introduced the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (CSA Z1003): a voluntary framework for identifying and managing psychological hazards at work. A second edition is in development.
Voluntary national standard
Bill C-65 and its regulations came into force on January 1, 2021. Together they set harassment and violence prevention duties for federally regulated employers, the federal public service, and Parliament.
federal
Each province and territory sets its own rules, and they continue to change. What applies to your organization depends on where your people work.
Knowing what applies in your own jurisdiction is the first step in preparing for it.
provincial & territorial
An Act to amend the Canada Labour Code (harassment and violence), the Parliamentary Employment and Staff Relations Act and the Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 1, S.C. 2018, c. 22. Work Place Harassment and Violence Prevention Regulations, SOR/2020-130.
This is general information, not legal advice. For what applies to your organization, speak with a lawyer or the workplace safety regulator in your province or territory.
Designed for leaders in real, complicated moments
You carry the weight of decisions that affect people’s lives, not just the quarterly results. You get the correlation between healthy, productive people and operational performance.
But faced with the increasing regulatory demand for psychological health and safety systems, you are looking for a guide to get beyond policies and procedures to get to human-centred leadership.
Senior leaders
You see the human signals before they show up in the metrics — the annual engagement survey results are not a surprise; they point to familiar themes.
You carry the mandate for culture and alignment for your team, and need a partner who understands the connection between the psychological health and safety system and what makes that psychologically safe work environment you want for your team.
People, culture, and team leadership
You are accountable to the public, to staff, and to a mandate that does not always fit neatly into a strategic plan.
You need advisory support that respects that complexity and does not default to corporate clichés.
Boards and public bodies
Summit to Shore is human-centred: a place where leaders can think out loud, see themselves clearly, and navigate change with steadiness and integrity. The work is personal, practical, and grounded in experience, not a philosophy.
I work alongside leaders who carry real responsibility — for people, for culture, and for performance. Leaders who want clarity without theatrics, partnership without pretense, and support that honours the complexity of their role.
A conversation, not a pitch
If something here resonates, we can begin with a quiet, unpressured conversation. No slide decks, no sales script. Just space to think together about what you are navigating, and what kind of support might actually help.
The Foundation Engagement is anchored in CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 (R2022), Psychological health and safety in the workplace — Prevention, promotion, and guidance to staged implementation (CSA Group, 2013). Psychological safety as a construct is Amy Edmondson's: Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 1999, 350–383). The thirteen psychosocial factors and the free assessment tools are set out in Guarding Minds at Work. The adaptive leadership work referenced in Approach is Heifetz & Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), which develops the technical and adaptive distinction first set out in Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Harvard Business School Press, 1994).
The economic cost figures in "What the evidence says" — $180 billion annually, about $110 billion of it carried by employers, and the share of employer expenditure directed to prevention — are from Morawczynski, Dobson, & Howatt, The Economic Cost of Mental Health in Canada (CSA Group Public Policy Centre, 2026). The return figures are Deloitte's The ROI in Workplace Mental Health Programs: Good for People, Good for Business (Chapman, Kangasniemi, Maxwell, & Sereneo, 2019), calculated from seven Canadian organizations with sufficient data among ten studied.