Open
Level 3. Scores 51 to 75. Your team speaks up, most of the time, for most people.
Your team speaks up. In the last month you have been told you were wrong with others present, mistakes have reached you first, the quieter people have said things without being asked, and someone has said "I don't know" in front of the group. This is an Open room and it is rarer than the leadership literature makes it sound. If you answered neither only a few times, you have seen these things rather than assumed them, which makes the score worth more.
What separates Open from Candid is consistency. Open rooms are safe most of the time and for most people. They stop being safe under pressure, at quarter end, when a senior visitor is in the room, or when the subject is the leader. Look at items one and three together. If people tell you that you are wrong, but only the same two people, and only on operational things, the room is open with a ceiling on it. The ceiling is usually the leader's own reactions on the things they care most about.
The second thing to check is item six and item twelve, the two reverse items. An Open room can still have one person hiding a problem or carrying something beyond them, and it is usually the person who joined most recently or who reports through someone else. Open on average is not open for everyone.
A founder in one of my rooms ran what everyone agreed was an open team. People challenged him on pricing and on hiring, and he thanked them for it. Then he announced a new market he had wanted to enter for a long time. Nobody argued. He took the silence as agreement. It was not. It was a team that had learned where the ceiling was, and the ceiling was anything he was visibly attached to.
He saw it when the plan started slipping and the doubts came out in one on ones instead of in the room. Then he did the right thing. He put the decision back on the table, said he was too attached to judge it alone, and asked the people who had doubted it privately to argue against it in front of the team. The decision changed shape, and the ceiling moved.
One thing to do this month. Ask for pushback on something you care about, not something operational. A decision you have already half made and are attached to. Say so: "I am attached to this, which is exactly why I want it argued with." The room will find out whether it is safe at the top of the stakes, and so will you.
When the team mode ships, the gap between your rating and your team's will be the most useful number on the page. Until then, ask one person on the team how they would have scored the last month.
Next step: if you want the AI era version of this question, whether people will tell you when the machine got it wrong, the AI leader readiness index covers it.
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About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Psychological Safety Scale, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.