Why My Players Followed a Glowing Mushroom (and What It Teaches Us About Transformational Leadership)

We were twenty minutes into the session when I realized I’d lost control. The group had just met what I had intended to be a throwaway NPC—a glowing, bipedal mushroom whose only job was to point them toward the real plot. It was supposed to say, “Strange things stir in the eastern ruins,” and then politely exit stage left to do whatever mushrooms do when they’re not advancing storylines. Instead, the way I apparently delivered the line made him sound like he’d been preparing his whole fungal life for that moment. To my players, he radiated the kind of quiet confidence you usually only see in people who have never once questioned their own sense of direction.

One player immediately sat straight up and said, “I follow this guy now.” No hesitation. No Insight check. Just full emotional commitment to the sentient fungus he’d known for three and a half minutes.

Another player decided to kneel. To a creature I had described—verbatim—as “a squat little toadstool with legs and basically the intelligence of a houseplant.”

And then this little thing I did to add color only made things worse. I had the mushroom tilt its cap ever so slightly toward the paladin when she spoke, then toward the wizard when he asked a question. It was meant to be a simple “facing the speaker” flourish—basic NPC body language so the scene didn’t feel like everyone was talking to a lawn ornament. But my players interpreted it as a deep personal recognition, as if the mushroom were seeing into their souls, weighing their burdens, and silently accepting them anyway. Individualized consideration, but with spores.

Within minutes, they were peppering him with questions:

“What is your message?”

“Do you have a prophecy?”

“Are we chosen?”

He still didn’t respond—because again, he could not speak beyond the one line I gave him—but silence did not deter them at all. They began reading meaning into the lack of meaning. The druid announced that the mushroom was “teaching through stillness.” The rogue suggested the glow might symbolize “the dawning of an age.” The bard said, with complete sincerity, “Maybe he’s waiting for us to discover the truth within ourselves.” 

Someone used Prestidigitation to give him a halo. Someone else hummed what sounded like the opening verse of a cult anthem. Meanwhile, the mushroom stood there, doing absolutely nothing besides emitting a gentle forest ambience, like an emotionally supportive nightlight.

By this point, the party had forgotten the main quest, the villain, each other’s names, and their own alignments. They had reorganized themselves into a full-blown devotion circle around a luminous fungus whose most impressive ability was “damp rot.” And yet, in their minds, he embodied vision, purpose, and a destiny that somehow involved all of them.

Standing there, watching them pledge their loyalty to a fungal bystander, I thought:

Ah. So this is how charismatic leadership accidents happen.

So… What Exactly Is Transformational Leadership? (And Why Did My Players Choose to Follow a Mushroom?)

Transformational leadership is one of those theories that sounds like it belongs in a TED talk hosted by a guy who owns too many vests, but the core idea is surprisingly human. Back in the late 1970s, James MacGregor Burns looked at political leaders and noticed that some of them didn’t just trade favors or hand out orders—they changed people. He called that process transformational leadership, and Bernard Bass later expanded it into something you could actually teach.^{1 2}

At its simplest, transformational leadership is what happens when someone inspires a group to rise above their own self-interest and work toward a bigger purpose. Northouse—my go-to academic Gandalf on these things—frames it as a style built on vision, meaning, challenge, and genuine care.3 It’s the difference between “Do this task because I said so,” and “We’re building something worth the struggle, and you matter in that story.”

And this is where my players come in. They didn’t follow the mushroom because he was powerful or threatening or offering great dental benefits. They followed him because, for thirty surreal seconds, he radiated confidence, mystery, and the vague promise of destiny. He didn’t have a plotline. He didn’t have a plan. But to them, he felt like someone who knew where things were going. 

That’s transformational leadership in a nutshell—or in this case, inside a glowing cap of fungal ambiguity. 

The Four Transformational Spell Components (Or Why Everyone Thought the Mushroom Had His Life Together)

If you want to understand why my group pledged themselves to a mushroom with the charisma of a damp sock, you have to look at the four components Bass laid out when he turned Burns’s theory into something mortal humans could apply.² They’re not spells, technically, but they behave an awful lot like enchantments cast on the emotional ecosystem of a team. 

The first is Idealized Influence, which basically means the leader becomes the kind of figure people want to follow. It’s moral gravity. People lean toward you because something about the way you carry yourself feels steady, principled, or just… better than the chaos everyone else is wading through. That’s why my players stared at the mushroom like he was a beacon of ancient wisdom instead of a damp woodland mistake. He projected presence, which is apparently all you need sometimes. 

Then there’s Inspiration Motivation, the part where leaders articulate a compelling vision. Not a bullet-pointed plan, but a picture of the future that feels worth the effort. The mushroom didn’t even really speak, but the faint glow he emitted somehow convinced the party that destiny was involved. In the workplace, this is the difference between “We need to reduce errors by five percent” and “Here’s the story of who we become when we get this right.” One is a metric. The other is a banner people rally around. 

The third component, Intellectual Stimulation, shows up when leaders challenge assumptions and invite people to rethink the familiar. The mushroom did this by merely existing. None of my players had planned to follow a bioluminescent fungus that afternoon, but the absurdity jolted them into a new mental space. Effective leaders do this without the spores: they ask better questions, poke at old routines, and make curiosity feel safe instead of like a trap. 

And finally, Individualized Consideration, which is leadership’s version of remembering that everyone has their own backstory. People thrive when someone notices them—not just in general, but specifically. The mushroom achieved this only because I accidentally described him turning slightly toward each character as they spoke. It was enough. My players took it as a sign of deep, personal recognition. In the real world, individualized consideration looks like actually listening, actually coaching, and actually knowing what matters to the humans you’re guiding. 

Put these four pieces together, and you get the recipe for the strange gravitational team that can make a team—or an adventuring party—decide, “Yes, this is the one we follow.”

Why This Works (According to Much Smarter People Than Me)

There’s a reason transformational leadership shows up in every leadership textbook, like the recurring NPC who refuses to die even after you drop a boulder on them. Researchers keep finding the same thing: when leaders inspire people, challenge people, and pay attention to them as actual human beings, those people tend to perform better, stay engaged longer, and—this is the wild part—actually care about the work they’re doing.^{4 5}

Bass argued that transformational leaders create something he called “extra effort,” which is academia’s polite way of saying that people will go beyond their job description without needing to be bribed with pizza or being threatened with “a quick chat.”2 That tracks with what every GM already knows: players show up energized when they feel like they’re part of the story, and not just completing tasks on an errand list. A compelling vision moves people more than a checklist ever could, unless maybe the checklist drops quest rewards when you finish it.

There’s also a psychological mechanism at work that Northouse breaks down with his usual calm, professional clarity.³ Transformational leaders tap into intrinsic motivation—the stuff people do because it feels meaningful, not because the supervisor is standing over their shoulder watching their every move. When people believe the work matters and they believe that they matter inside that work, you don’t get grudging compliance. You get momentum. 

Think of it this way: a good transactional leader says, “Here’s your task.” A transformational leader says, “Here’s the world we’re building, and here’s why your part changes everything.” 

That difference turns ordinary teams into something closer to a fellowship on an epic quest—minus the cursed rings and dramatic orchestral soundtrack. 

Where Transformational Leaders Accidentally Go Full Villain

The danger with transformational leadership is that it works. It works so well that a leader can start believing their own mythology. Bass and Steidlmeier called this pseudo-transformational leadership, which is academic shorthand for “charisma that’s been left out in the sun too long.”6 It starts innocently: the leader paints a compelling vision, people get excited, momentum builds. Then, little by little, the leader starts to enjoy the spotlight more than the shared purpose that justified it. 

You can usually spot the turn the same way you spot a mimic in a dungeon: not because it immediately jumps out and tries to eat you, but because something feels familiar in the wrong way. At first, it’s the little things. A leader who used to ask, “What do you think?” starts phrasing it as, “Here’s what you need to do.” A leader who once welcomed pushback now freezes for half a second—just long enough to register that your question landed like a pebble thrown at a wasp nest. None of this looks dramatic in the moment. If anything, it feels like the natural evolution of someone “stepping into their authority.” But underneath, the tone has shifted.

It’s like following a torchbearer through a cave system. Initially, that light is a comfort. You stay close because they know the way, and you don’t want to twist an ankle on ancient stone stairs. But as you go deeper, the glow seems to get brighter until it’s all you can see. The walls, the branching paths, even the faces of the people walking beside you, fade into silhouettes. You find yourself turning down corridors that you didn’t realize you’d agreed to, trusting the torchbearer because you can’t see anything else. By the time you realize you’ve stopped navigating and started following, you’re already miles underground. 

In the workplace, the slide happens when someone with real presence starts treating their intuition like sacred scripture. They stop checking assumptions because they assume they no longer have them. They talk about “our mission” while quietly editing everyone else’s contributions out of the final draft. Decision-making starts piling up around them the way loose goblins flock to whoever’s holding the shiniest sword, until the whole team is blindly following one person’s instincts. 

At the table, this drift shows up when a GM’s grand narrative starts shrinking the players’ choices. Suddenly, every clue points to the same location, every NPC nudges them toward the same plan, and every attempt to improvise is quietly steered back onto the “real story.” The GM isn’t trying to be controlling—they just believe so fiercely in their vision that they start treating player agency like a variable that must be managed. It’s railroading, but wrapped in the language of destiny. Players might still feel inspired, but their options are slowly narrowing until they’re basically passengers on the GM’s narrative bullet train, having effectively stopped being co-authors and becoming audience members. 

What makes this so insidious is that, on the surface, nothing looks wrong. The GM still sounds passionate. The story still sounds meaningful. The players feel like they’re part of something epic. But under the hood, the flow of influence has quietly reversed. Instead of the leader shaping the vision with the group, the group is now bending themselves around the leader’s vision. Agency becomes decoration. Collaboration becomes compliance wearing a fun hat. And because everyone’s still having a pretty good time, nobody notices the drift until they realize they haven’t made a real choice in three sessions. 

And this is where transformational leadership can turn manipulative without anyone noticing. The leader still talks about growth and meaning and potential, but now those ideas funnel toward one place: reinforcing the leader’s identity. Followers think they’re part of a grand vision, but they slowly realize they’ve been helping one person construct something closer to a monument to themselves—huge, ornate, and unmistakably shaped like their own ego. 

The line between inspiration and manipulation doesn’t snap like a trap door. It’s more like a hallway with a slow-moving conveyor belt. You don’t even realize you’ve crossed it until you look up and see the giant fresco of the leader’s face staring back at you. 

Practical Application for Real Leaders (And GMs Who Don’t Want Party Members Joining Cults)

The good news is that you don’t need glowing spores or ancient prophecies to use transformational leadership well. Most of the work happens in the small, almost boring behaviors that build trust and momentum over time. The trick is remembering that inspiration isn’t a one-way broadcast. It’s a feedback loop. If vision is the torch, feedback is the map that keeps you from marching confidently into the nearest wall. 

The first piece is sharing the “why” like it actually matters. Not the corporate version where someone slaps a mission statement onto a poster, but the real version—helping people understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. When people can see the arc they’re contributing to, they stop feeling like task-doers and start acting like problem-solvers. It’s the same reason players care about a campaign in the first place: stakes create investment. 

The second is inviting thinking rather than performing certainty. A transformational leader doesn’t hand out perfect answers; they distribute curiosity. In a workplace, that sounds like, “What is the smartest way to fix this?” instead of, “Here’s the solution, just do it.” At the table, it’s letting players try something weird, even when it wasn’t in your prep. Especially if it wasn’t in your prep. 

And then there’s individual attention, the part that a lot of people skip because it feels slow. This is the part where you notice when someone’s burned out, or confused, or quietly carrying the emotional equivalent of a cursed item they haven’t identified yet. It’s small-scale, personal leadership—the antidote to the grandiose “my vision is the only truth” trap. 

Transformational leadership isn’t about being the hero. It’s about creating the environment where people can show up as their best selves without needing a prophecy to convince them. Do it right, and your team doesn’t form a cult around you—they form a community around a shared vision. 

How to Tell You’re Doing It Right (A Highly Unscientific Check)

The funny thing about transformational leadership is that you don’t always feel it working. There’s no dramatic cutscene where your team stands in a circle, raises their weapons to the sky, and pledges their undying loyalty to your quarterly objectives. Most of the time, the signs are much smaller and far less cinematic.

You’ll notice people start offering ideas without being prompted. Not the safe ideas, but the weird, interesting ones—the kind players pitch when they trust the GM won’t punish them for thinking outside the box. You’ll hear more sentences that start with “What if we tried…?” and fewer that start with “Sorry, quick question…” delivered in the same cautious voice people use when they’re not sure whether or not the doorway is trapped.

You’ll also see people taking ownership of problems before you even ask. This isn’t martyrdom or overwork—it’s the natural side effect of feeling like a co-author instead of a background extra. When people believe they’re shaping the story, they don’t wait for permission to contribute to it. 

And maybe the biggest sign? You stop being the center of the room. The energy starts moving sideways—people talking to each other, helping one another, and building momentum together. Your job becomes less about directing traffic and more about keeping the road clear. 

That’s how you know transformational leadership is working: the spotlight widens, the table opens up, and the story no longer depends on you being the center of it. 

Wrap up: The Mushroom, the Torch, and the Whole Leadership Thing

By the time my players finished pledging themselves to the glowing mushroom, I’d realized something important: they weren’t following him because he was powerful or mysterious or even remotely qualified to guide anyone anywhere. They followed him because, for one absurd moment, he embodied the core pieces of transformational leadership—vision, presence, curiosity, and the sense that everyone at the table mattered. 

The difference, of course, is that the mushroom had no actual plan. He wasn’t trying to inspire anyone. He was just standing there, quietly bioluminescing while five adults projected meaning onto him like he was the forest’s long-lost prophet. In real leadership, you don’t get to coast on ambience. You have to make choices. You have to stay self-aware. You have to check whether your bright torch is still lighting the path, or if the light has grown so blinding that no one can see the branching tunnels anymore. 

That’s the real lesson of transformational leadership. When you do it well, people don’t form a cult around you—they form a commitment around a shared purpose you built together. The goal isn’t to be the mushroom. The goal is to be the leader who makes sure nobody follows one by accident. 

Endnotes

¹ Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row.

Foundational source where the term “transformational leadership” first appears.

² Bass, B. M. (1985). Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. New York: Free Press.

Bass is the one who turns Burns’s idea into a model you can actually teach humans.

³ Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and Practice (9th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

My personal “Gandalf of leadership textbooks.”

⁴ Avolio, B. J., & Bass, B. M. (1991). The Full Range of Leadership Development: Basic and Advanced Manuals. Binghamton, NY: Bass, Avolio & Associates.

Provides empirical grounding for why transformational leadership boosts motivation and performance.

⁵ Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755–768.

The meta-analysis that keeps showing up in leadership conversations like an NPC who refuses to die.

⁶ Bass, B. M., & Steidlmeier, P. (1999). Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership. Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 181–217.

Defines the “pseudo-transformational” villain arc we’re all trying to avoid.