Instilling pride in one’s work is a key to leadership, says psychologist Shelley Reciniello, author of the new book “The Conscious Leader.”

The New York City-based author, who has worked with many major American corporations, shows how the delicate mechanism of the mind is worth understanding as much as or more than profit-and-loss sheets, mechanical seals, or tax forms with grandstanding egos and possible self-sabotage lurking under the deep psychological terrain.

“It’s important to understand psychology,” Reciniello said. “There’s no quick fix and there’s nothing more complex than a human beings mind at work.”

A case study in this can be found at the Fort Smith Regional Landfill, where Sanitation Director Baridi Nkokheli has helped changed the perception of employees as “garbage men” to “sanitation workers.” Nkokheli, who has been in the sanitation business for 36 years, said he has never seen a community that appreciates its sanitation workers as much as Fort Smith. Changing that public’s perception, however, began with changing the workers’ perceptions of themselves, he said.

“For me, the key to managing colleagues and co-workers and instilling pride is showing there is no hierarchy structure,” Nkokheli said. “No one is more important than another. Their impact may be different, but nobody’s job is more or less important than someone else’s job. There’s a fragility of that psychology if not treated in a certain way.”

Understanding an employee’s fears and motivations are key to management, says Dave Robertson, director of the Center for Business and Professional Development and Family Enterprise Center at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

UAFS hosts a psychology class for business leaders in the fall “that teaches people how to supervise in this modern age.” Human Relations and Interpersonal Skills at UAFS is a 16-week class, held one day per week, taught twice on Mondays with two options for class times: 8 a.m. to noon and 4-8 pm.

When it comes to incorporating new ideas into a business strategy, UAFS Chancellor Paul Beran says it’s important to have others be “invested and engaged in it” while the leader moves it forward from the periphery.

“Ideas that normally fail are ones from CEOs that come as a dictate, particularly at institutions that are based on creative thought and action like higher education,” Beran wrote. “It’s not to manipulate people — it’s to give them the choice and the authority to participate and move an idea forward in a way that is stimulating for them but still moves the institution in the right direction.”

In her book, Reciniello takes business leaders through nine similar principles and practices that aim “to create a wide-awake and productive workplace.”

“Like it or not, doing business today requires navigating the underground psychological terrain of people at work,” a news release about the book states. “Corporations are not people, but are made up of people. To ignore the imperfect humanness of professional interactions is a foolish omission that will always undermine success and satisfaction.”

Some of those mind land mines include egos that may put personal success ahead of corporate achievement, or even underlying anger that surfaces in response to company policies. Possibly outdated, but often quoted still today, is a 1993 study by the Chicago-based Safe Workplace Institute that said workplace violence costs $4.2 billion each year, estimating more than 111,000 violent incidents. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 500,000 victims of violent crime in the workplace lose an estimated 1.8 million workdays each year.

“Of all the emotions, the most confusing one is anger,” Reciniello said.

There could be ill treatment by a manager, and fear so contagious that people spend most of their time just trying to keep their jobs instead of doing their jobs, Reciniello adds.

“Unconscious and problematic issues, behaviors, relationships, and interactions specific to the workplace make their days unfulfilling, challenging in a negative way, disheartening and disappointing, and sometimes, a downright nightmare,” Reciniello states. “You can have no illusions about how that affects your bottom line.”

Working as a sort of psychological detective, Reciniello’s job has been to consult with organizations and individuals to figure out what the real problem is when a poised-for-success corporate initiative fails, when a promising individual or team can’t perform, or when a well-conceived departmental project doesn’t deliver.

When what has gone wrong doesn’t make sense, she says she looks for the unrecognized, underlying psychological issues that caused the problem. What’s going on unconsciously, out of awareness, is often more important than what is happening on the surface, she said.

Reciniello has a clinical/social psychology doctorate from the Graduate Faculty of the New School For Social Research and is a member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations.