A Leader's Journey

By the time Wieand was forced to resign in June 1985, he had alienated all but two members of the board. Pushing for the job of CEO, when his rival had more seniority and lots more allies, was his final, fatal error. "If I had listened, I would have heard people warning me to slow down," Wieand says. "But I started thinking that I knew better than everyone else."

That's another of Wieand's paradoxical laws of human nature: Intoxicated with their success, executives start to define themselves by their job title, rather than by who they are inside. They lose touch with their emotions, and they become insensitive to how they affect others and intolerant of others' weaknesses. "If you idealize your role -- which is what happens to most of the people I see -- you fool yourself about what people really think of you," Wieand says. "You don't know when or why you get defensive. You don't get open and honest feedback from people. There's no reality testing."

Wieand says that when he was fired, he found himself in a "free fall." He went from feeling "almost like a king" to feeling like that "stupid, worthless" little boy who couldn't handle seventh-grade math. "Back then, Paul didn't look at his job as just an experience," says Jay Sidhu, 47, who had worked with Wieand at Independence and who is now the CEO of Sovereign Bank. "The job was him; it was what made him feel powerful."

Six months after leaving Independence, Wieand was hired by the federal government to turn around a failing savings-and-loan, Penn Savings Bank. As CEO and president, Wieand immediately took the bank public and renamed it Sovereign (sovereignty is another word for independence). Then he hired Sidhu, his most talented colleague at Independence, and acquired Yardley Savings and Loan, a thrift in Independence's backyard. "I was laughing at the guys at Independence," Wieand says. "I wanted to stick it to the people who screwed me."

By 1989, Sovereign had $1.5 billion in assets and was heralded as a model turnaround. Wieand was earning more than ever before, but he felt as if he were sleepwalking through work. At night, he took refuge in books -- some written by management gurus like Peter Drucker, but mostly books written by existential psychologists like Rollo May. "I wanted to know why running the bank was easy intellectually, but hard emotionally," says Wieand.

So, when a shrewd multimillionaire turkey farmer, who later would plot to sell the thrift, joined the board and declared war on him, Wieand -- then only 41 -- decided to retire. He took his five- year $1 million golden parachute, which included stock options and a generous pension, and, within a month, began graduate school at Temple University, in Philadelphia. While pursuing his PhD, Wieand began coaching executives part-time. But his leadership-development program didn't really begin to take shape until he started working with acute schizophrenics during his residency at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital.

At Trenton, he formed a therapy group for middle-aged patients who had IQs of 150 or more. "How come people with off-the-chart IQs couldn't handle the simplest social interactions?" Wieand wanted to know. By working in "the extremes of human nature," he thought he might gain insights into the "insanity" that he saw in the corporate world.

Working with his "mensa group," Wieand developed his self-revealing style with patients and found that it produced powerful results. ("Where is the dignity and respect in asking people about their intimate secrets, when you're not sharing your own?" he asks.) Wieand saw that by sharing his story and by answering honestly the most personal of questions, he could get even the most antisocial patients -- who included a brilliant mathematician and the son of a Nobel laureate -- to respond. "Just getting these patients to show up for a group was a miracle," says Jan Birchfield, who also worked at Trenton Hospital. "Paul got them communicating."

Wieand also made an important discovery that would lead to his notion of the learning leader. "I saw that everyone -- whether they're patients in a psych ward or executives in a corporation -- wants the same things in life: to be recognized, to be cared for, and to be given an opportunity to grow. And, if you're authentic and trustful, people will realize that, and they'll respond. Authenticity is contagious." After all, he adds, "If creating an atmosphere of trust and authenticity can get acute schizophrenics to work together, think of what presumably less-fragile people can do."

The Leadership Emotion