If I were going to help a company become more psychologically sophisticated, here are a few of the many issues I’d focus on:

1. Understand that abusive controlling leaders are usually secretly insecure and weak. If you don’t perceive this contradiction, your way of dealing with them may be ineffective.

1. Jealousy and envy are to be expected in hierarchical organizations. They are raw expressions of more basic desires. You may have to be patient with these symptoms. Don’t just try to get rid of them but help them ripen into more positive energies.

1. A person in authority may not deal with their position well because of bad experiences in the family and in childhood. You may need some empathic, deep discussions before you can work out solutions with them.

1. People tend to develop hostile feelings toward each other when they don’t have opportunities to really get acquainted. It’s too easy then to direct stray negative fantasies at fellow workers.

1. Conviviality can give the soul the security and deep satisfaction it craves. Gatherings where people can truly enjoy one another and daily breaks in a convivial atmosphere could help, not hurt, productivity.

1. Being critical and vocal about fellow workers may stem from insecurity, an overwhelming need to keep the job, or habits learned at home. A few lessons in dealing with insecurity would go a long way.

1. A business can’t provide deep therapy for all its workers, but it can create a work environment that is not emotionally toxic. A sensitive style of leadership especially can help create real community, which can tone down the negativity.

1. Therapy always begins with listening. Any business could create a structure in which just listening to workers’ issues could help with morale.

1. The physical environment can also soothe the soul: fresh air, plants and trees, water, a place to walk, a comfortable workstation, well-selected colors. Therapy often involves physical details; it is not just a mental activity.

1. Images affect the soul deeply. You can devote attention to the art images in the workplace or to any aspect of the place seen as an image. How do you feel in a medical center, waiting for your doctor, in a small room with no windows and perhaps plastic images of blocked arteries or diseased organs? Even a small degree of awareness could make the image environment supportive rather than destructive.

4. Oblivious Leaders: Overcoming Power Poisoning

“By making things too easy on themselves, GM prevented leaders from coming to grips with the bad friction that their system imposed on customers —and with other drawbacks of their offerings.

The second symptom of power poisoning is the belief that, because you are powerful and a connected insider, you automatically know everything that matters about your organization. Academics call this the fallacy of centrality. It was uncovered by Ron Westrum in a study of why pediatricians did such a lousy job of diagnosing child abuse in the 1950s and 1960s. The limited self-awareness of these experts, their failure to see through parents’ lies, and the silence of terrified children led the doctors to conclude, wrongly, “If parents were abusing their children, I would know about it; since I don’t know, it isn’t happening.

The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness. People who are puffed up with self-importance are prone to devote little attention to the burdens they inflict on others, and to care little about the plight of people with less privilege. In The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner from the University of California at Berkeley shows that, in numerous studies—on everything from donating money, to teasing, to how much people talk, to negotiation strategies, to sharing cookies—when people lord over others or feel powerful and prestigious, they (1) focus more on satisfying their own needs, (2) focus less on others’ needs and behaviors, and (3) act as if the rules don’t apply to them.

A similar study of driver behavior in Las Vegas found that, for every $1,000 increase in their car’s value, drivers were 3 percent less likely to stop for pedestrians who had the right-of-way at a crosswalk. In short, if you wield influence over others or just feel powerful, you may become oblivious of “inconveniences” that you heap on the people below you and that your organization heaps on customers and clients.