Lead with humanity. Inspire performance that lasts.
Summit to Shore Human Centred Leadership Advisory is designed to help leaders explore the challenges they face related to employee capacity, productivity, and performance, and how to navigate change that will lead their team to performance that lasts.
My name is Mark Roach. As Founder and Principal Advisor, I work alongside leaders who own that responsibility and who believe how you lead matters as much as where you are headed: people making the connection between psychologically safe working conditions, the capacity of their teams, and performance that lasts.
An organization performs to the limit of what its people are willing to say out loud.
Psychological safety does not travel upward
Leaders are observed. Behaviour, not written policy, informs the rules.
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 evidence says
How people are treated and how an organization performs are not separate questions.
These figures matter because of what sits behind them: your people, and the performance that follows from how they are treated. They are the reason to start the work to build the system.
Improved learning and performance
Meta-analysis across many teams links psychological safety to team learning and, through it, to performance, most strongly in complex, knowledge-intensive work.
Sanner & Bunderson, 2015
Twice as often
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.
Rozovsky, 2015
The question worth asking is what your own numbers would say and whether you know how safe your people feel.
$180 billion a year
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.
Morawczynski, Dobson, & Howatt, 2026
86 percent is spent after the harm
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.
Morawczynski, Dobson, & Howatt, 2026
$1.62 to $2.18 returned per dollar
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.
Chapman, Kangasniemi, Maxwell, & Sereneo, 2019
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
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 the 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.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
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. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041386614565145
Rozovsky, J. (2015, November 17). The five keys to a successful Google team. re:Work, Google.
Morawczynski, O., Dobson, K., & Howatt, W. (2026). The economic cost of mental health in Canada. CSA Group Public Policy Centre. https://www.csagroup.org/article/public-policy/the-economic-cost-of-mental-health-in-canada/
Chapman, S., Kangasniemi, A., Maxwell, L., & Sereneo, M. (2019). The ROI in workplace mental health programs: Good for people, good for business. Deloitte Insights. Return figures calculated from seven Canadian organizations with sufficient data, among 10 studied.
CSA Group. (2013, reaffirmed 2022). CAN/CSA-Z1003-13/BNQ 9700-803/2013 (R2022), Psychological health and safety in the workplace — Prevention, promotion, and guidance to staged implementation. https://www.csagroup.org/article/can-csa-z1003-13-bnq-9700-803-2013-r2022-psychological-health-and-safety-in-the-workplace/
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 (Bill C-65). Work Place Harassment and Violence Prevention Regulations, SOR/2020-130.