Roll For Insight

Tag: transformational leadership

  • Omni-Man and the Perils of Charisma Without Ethics

    Omni-Man and the Perils of Charisma Without Ethics

    What Invincible Teaches Us About Leadership (and Screwing It Up)

    Note: This essay contains spoilers for Season 1 of Invincible. Consider this your official warning before we apply Bernard Bass’s 1990 leadership framework to a cartoon man punching his own son through several office buildings.

    My stepson introduced me to Invincible, and watching episodes has kind of become a family ritual. If you’ve never seen it,  let me catch you up real quick. Superman, but with a mustache, shows up, builds a life, raises a son, and then one day casually murders half his coworkers in the most gruesome way possible. That’s not a spoiler; it’s Season 1, Episode 1. Omni-Man is the dad every suburban HOA thinks they want – handsome, confident, the type of guy who would fix your gutters while explaining why you should stop voting for tax increases. Except he’s also a colonizer sent to conquer Earth, and the whole “family man” thing is just long-term undercover work. Which makes him the perfect case study for what happens when charisma shows up without any ethical leadership attached. 

    Here’s the thing. Bernard Bass (1990) wrote about transformational leadership as if it were the gold standard of “good” leadership. He broke it down into four parts: inspirational motivation (painting a vision), idealized influence (being a role model), individualized consideration (actually giving a shit about people as individuals), and intellectual stimulation (getting people to think differently). Done right, it turns a group of employees – or superheroes – into a force that believes in something bigger than themselves. Done wrong, it turns them into cannon fodder for someone else’s personal crusade. Omni-Man is a textbook transformational leader. Right up until you notice he’s transforming people into stains on the pavement. 

    Think about how Omni-Man treats his son, Mark, in Season 1. Early on, he’s the encouraging father, telling Mark that becoming a superhero will be hard but meaningful. He trains him, mentors him, and models what it means to “do the right thing.” That’s the framework of transformational leadership right there. Mark looks up to him, imitates him, believes in him. The problem is that every bit of that framework is fake. It’s not built for Mark’s growth. It’s built to condition Mark to accept the Viltrumite worldview – strength over compassion, empire over community. That’s the difference between ethics and manipulation. And the second Mark resists, Omni-Man drops the act like a toddler dropping an iPad. 

    This is where charisma gets dangerous. Charisma makes you believe in the person before you’ve had time to check if their vision actually includes you.  It’s the shiny lure that makes people swallow the hook. Bass (1990) himself warned that charisma is morally neutral. It can inspire great social movements or genocidal nightmares. Northouse (2022) makes the same point. Charisma works, but it doesn’t come with built-in ethical guidelines. That’s why charismatic leaders can either mobilize people to march for civil rights or convince them to drink poison in a jungle compound. The mustache doesn’t make the man. Ethics do. 

    One of the most chilling moments in Season 1 is Omni-Man explaining to Mark why humanity is beneath them. He doesn’t just say “I’m stronger, so I should rule.” He says it with that calm, steady, paternal tone. The same tone he used when teaching Mark how to throw a baseball. That’s what makes it horrifying. The very cadence that once inspired trust is now being used to justify mass murder. That’s charisma without ethics. When the same voice that once motivated you suddenly tells you your life is worthless, and part of you still wants to believe it. 

    And let’s not pretend this is confined to alien overloads on animated TV. Every workplace has seen the Omni-Man archetype in khakis. The VP who tells stories about “vision” and “disruption” but quietly measures worth in profit margins and how fast they can chew through new hires before running out of warm bodies. The manager who says “we’re all family here” right before giving a bunch of people the axe. The coach who insists that losing builds character but only spends time with the players who pad his win record. They’re charismatic. They’re inspiring. And then you find out that their charisma was just the camouflage for their actual agenda.

    The counterexample in Invincible is Cecil, who is the opposite of inspiring. He’s gruff, morally compromised, and perpetually five minutes away from a stroke. But he at least embodies adaptive leadership (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). He tells people the truth: every option is bad, some less bad than others. He doesn’t try to dazzle you into following. He tries to survive alongside you. Cecil may not make anyone want to tattoo his face on their bicep, but he does something Omni-Man never could. He builds trust out of transparency. People will follow you through hell if they believe you’re burning, too. 

    Omni-Man, by contrast, builds nothing but fragile compliance. The Guardians of the Globe trusted him because of his charisma and record, not because he ever invited them into his vision. And when he killed them, no one even saw it coming, because no one had ever been close enough to see him for what he actually was. That’s the cautionary tale Bass (1990) would underline, circle, and use two exclamation points. Transformational leadership without ethics corrodes culture from the inside out. It doesn’t just betray trust. It makes people question whether trust is even possible. 

    For a second, let’s pull this down to earth, because no, most of us aren’t secretly grooming our children to help us conquer the planet. But the planet shows up smaller and quieter in everyday leadership. You hire into a job because the manager seems inspiring, because they talk about growth and opportunity. Six months later, you realize the “growth” was a euphemism for doing two jobs at once, and the “opportunity” was the opportunity to burn out. Or you sit down at the D&D table where the GM promises a player-driven story, only to find every choice redirected because they actually wrote a novel instead of a campaign. That’s Omni-Man with dice instead of fists. The betrayal doesn’t sting because of the outcome. It stings because you believed them when they said your choices mattered. 

    Cue the infomercial voiceover, “There’s got to be a better way. Now there is!” Ethical Leadership. Brown and Treviño (2006) describe it as modeling normatively appropriate conduct, communicating it clearly, and reinforcing it consistently. It sounds dry, but in practice, it means one simple thing. Your charisma isn’t yours. It belongs to the people who trust you, and they’re letting you borrow it as long as you use it responsibly. If you betray that trust, there’s no speech or mustache impressive enough to bring it back. Ethical leadership is what separates a transformational leader from a manipulator. 

    Amy Edmondson’s (1999) research on psychological safety drives this home. Teams thrive when people feel safe to speak, fail, and learn without fear of humiliation or punishment. Omni-Man doesn’t just fail at creating psychological safety. He annihilates it with prejudice. The moment Mark pushes back, Omni-Man doesn’t create space for dialogue. He beats his son half to death to enforce compliance. Replace “fists” with “shaming in meetings” or “retaliating against dissenters,” and suddenly, you’ve got a case study in bad management instead of supervillainy. Different scale, same outcome. Silence, fear, and eventual collapse. 

    The lesson isn’t “charisma bad.” Charisma matters. Confidence matters. Vision matters. But charisma is like fire. It’s useful when it’s contained, but can be catastrophic when left unsupervised. Transformational leadership only works when charisma is tethered to ethics, when the vision is genuinely shared, and when the people in your orbit aren’t just NPCs in your story. Omni-Man had the fire but none of the responsibility. That’s why his legacy isn’t leadership. It’s trauma. 

    And yes, I’m aware I just spent 1,300 words applying Bernard Bass’s 1990 framework for transformational leadership to a cartoon man in spandex who uses a subway train as a teaching aid. But that’s the point. Leadership theory isn’t supposed to live in textbooks. It’s supposed to help us see what’s happening around us. Invincible just happens to be a gorier, louder mirror of something we already recognize. Charismatic leaders can give us the razzle-dazzle with their vision right up until we realize that vision never included us. 

    So here’s your homework. Think about the most charismatic leader you’ve ever worked for. Now ask, did their vision make room for you? Or was it just camouflage for their actual mission? If it’s the second, congratulations – you’ve already met your own Omni-Man. And unlike in Invincible, you don’t need to punch them through a mountain. You just need to stop mistaking charisma for leadership. 

    References

    • Bass, B. M. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19–31.
    • Northouse, P. G. (2022). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). Sage.
    • Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. Harvard Business Review Press.
    • Brown, M. E., & Treviño, L. K. (2006). Ethical leadership: A review and future directions. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 595–616.
    • Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
  • The Rules Changed, But We Just Forgot to Tell You

    The Rules Changed, But We Just Forgot to Tell You

    Nothing makes people question your leadership faster than realizing the finish line they’ve been running toward just got picked up and moved. This is the organizational version of telling a kid they can have dessert if they finish their vegetables, then halfway through the broccoli deciding they also need to clean the garage and mow the lawn first. The dessert was never the point. The goal was to keep them occupied until you could figure out how to get out of your own chores.

    In corporate life, this usually shows up when leadership makes a promise they didn’t fully think through. The intent might have even been noble at first — “Hey, we’ll make sure everyone gets a fair shot at promotion.” But when the sign-up sheet fills faster than expected and the people who actually have to conduct those evaluations start sweating about their workload, suddenly there’s a brand-new hoop to jump through. A leadership assessment. A timed test. An extra round of manager sign-off. And here’s the kicker: fail that extra hoop and you don’t just miss your shot — you don’t even get told what you did wrong, so you can fix it next time.

    From the outside, this reads less like “streamlining the process” and more like “we realized how much work this would be for us, so we invented a filter to thin the herd.” There’s no transparency, no feedback, and no sense that the people in charge remember they promised you something in the first place. Which brings us to the real damage: it’s not the inconvenience that kills morale. It’s the unspoken message that your leadership’s word is provisional. Conditional. Entirely dependent on whether it still suits them to keep it.

    If you’ve ever run a game of D&D, you know exactly how this plays out. You tell your group that if they defeat the Big Bad Evil Guy, they’ll hit Level 10. This is the campaign’s driving goal. Every plan, every detour, every questionable alliance with shady NPCs is about gearing up for that final fight. Then, right before the big showdown, you say, “Actually, before you can fight him, you’ll need to pass this riddle challenge. Fail, and you can’t try again until next year. Oh, and I won’t tell you what answers you got wrong.” At best, the players feel blindsided. At worst, they start suspecting you never really wanted them to succeed in the first place. And once players stop trusting their GM, the game stops being fun. They’ll still show up — sunk-cost fallacy is a hell of a drug — but the spark’s gone.

    And here’s where leadership theory has been screaming warnings for decades. In transformational leadership, one of the core jobs of a leader is to inspire people toward a shared vision through consistency, trust, and integrity (Bass, 1990). If the vision changes, you bring your team along for the why, the how, and the what’s-next. But if you just quietly rewrite the playbook mid-season without telling anyone, you’ve broken what Rousseau (1995) calls the psychological contract — that unspoken agreement between leader and team about what each side owes the other. Once that’s broken, even the most committed, high-performing people start conserving their energy. Not out of spite, but out of survival. They’ve learned the rules can change without warning, so why go all-in?

    There’s a way to fix this without torching morale, but it requires humility and a little bit of courage. If you truly can’t honor the original path you laid out — whether because of volume, budget, or your own failure to anticipate demand — transparency is your only way out. Spell out what’s changing, why it’s changing, and how people can still succeed under the new system. Give feedback, even if it’s just “You scored lower on decision-making under time pressure — here’s where to practice.” If you have to thin the candidate pool, do it in a way that still respects the original promise, even if it means spreading things out over a longer timeline. Otherwise, you’re just selecting for the people most willing to tolerate frustration, which is not the same as selecting for the people most capable of leading.

    The rules can change — life’s unpredictable, and leadership is about adapting. But if you want your people to keep showing up with full effort, the one rule that can’t change is this: when you say something matters, it has to keep mattering, even when it’s inconvenient for you.

    References:

    Bass, B. M. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19–31.

    Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. Sage Publications.

  • The Feedback That Was Actually a Trap: Weaponized Coaching and the Illusion of Development

    The Feedback That Was Actually a Trap: Weaponized Coaching and the Illusion of Development

    There’s a moment in bad D&D campaigns when the GM grins too much. You know the look. The party just triggered something, maybe opened a door they weren’t supposed to, or used a clever workaround to bypass some elaborate puzzle, and the GM, instead of rolling with it, tilts their head and says, “Interesting.” That’s the moment you realize you’ve made a mistake. Not in the game. In trusting the GM. Because that smile? That’s the “this is going in the kill box” smile. And the only reason your character’s still breathing is because the plot isn’t done punishing you yet.

    That’s what fake coaching feels like in the workplace.

    It starts off warm. Encouraging. Your boss says they’re “invested in your development” and want to “help you grow.” It’s like they just pulled you aside in the tavern and offered you a side quest. You feel chosen. Important. Maybe this is it—your chance to level up, to finally get out of the hell that is middle-tier oblivion where your talents are wasted and your coffee goes cold before you remember where you left it. But instead of getting a magic item, you get assigned a “stretch project” with no guidance, no resources, and no context. And somewhere around hour fourteen of trying to decode the office spreadsheet equivalent of ancient dwarven runes, you realize: this wasn’t a gift. This was a test. And you are not supposed to pass it.

    This is what I call development theater—the illusion of mentorship with none of the substance. It’s the kind of thing that looks amazing in a quarterly report. “We’re committed to employee growth,” they’ll say, while quietly tossing people into career quicksand and blaming them for not building a ladder. And the worst part? You can’t even prove it. Because technically, they did coach you. They gave you feedback. They offered you opportunity. They gave you rope—just enough to hang yourself artistically, in the break room, next to a printout of last year’s mission statement.

    The TTRPG version of this is the GM who swears they’re “collaborative,” then turns every piece of your backstory into a trap. You tell them your character once abandoned a sibling in a burning village? Great. Now the final boss is the sibling, and no, you don’t get a redemption arc, you get stabbed with a flaming pitchfork while the GM does a bad voice and says, “This is what you deserve.” You thought you were building a narrative. Turns out, you were providing raw materials for a vengeance fantasy they’ve been workshopping since their sophomore year creative writing class.

    But let’s go back to the office. Because this isn’t just bad management—it’s a strategy. It’s called plausible deniability leadership. It’s what happens when someone wants you gone, but doesn’t want to look like the bad guy. So instead, they offer you “growth.” They suggest “areas for improvement.” They ask you to “stretch beyond your comfort zone,” while quietly collecting screenshots and calendar invites like evidence for a crime they’re planning to report after the fact. You’re not being coached. You’re being turned into a cautionary tale.

    And you start to notice it, too late. You start wondering why your emails are getting ignored. Why projects get reassigned without explanation. Why every compliment you get sounds like it came from an AI that only read the first paragraph of your résumé. You start to feel like you’re being haunted by a ghost version of your reputation. Like someone filed a secret report that says you’re “difficult to work with,” and now everyone’s treating you like a cursed item—technically useful, but risky to equip.

    Leadership theory actually has a name for the good version of this: Individualized Consideration, one of the pillars of Transformational Leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006). That’s when leaders offer feedback and development tailored to each person’s goals, strengths, and needs. But there’s a dark mirror to this: Pseudo-Transformational Leadership (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999), where the tools of mentorship get twisted into performance theater. It’s the difference between helping someone grow and using the language of growth to justify pushing them out. The difference between a GM saying, “Let’s explore your character’s fears,” and a GM saying, “Hey, I noticed your character’s afraid of drowning, so I made all the dungeons water now.”

    And no, it’s not just one bad boss or one bad GM. This happens in systems where psychological safety—the foundation of trust and learning on any team—is treated like a luxury add-on (Edmondson, 1999). The moment people start to feel like feedback is a setup, they stop trying. They shut down. They play it safe. They stop asking questions, stop offering ideas, stop rolling with disadvantage unless absolutely necessary. And then leadership turns around and says, “Why don’t we have more innovation around here?”

    Here’s the wild part: most of the time, the people doing this think they’re being kind. They think that by softening the truth, or sugarcoating the failure, they’re protecting you. They don’t realize that fake feedback is worse than silence. That pretending to help while secretly preparing your exit is like handing someone a parachute made of spaghetti. You’re not saving anyone. You’re just putting on a show before the impact.

    So here’s how we do it better.

    If you’re in charge of people—at a table, on a loading dock, in a customer service team in a crumbling office park built entirely out of sadness and reused drywall—then ask yourself: Is this feedback meant to help this person? Or is it meant to protect me from looking like the bad guy later? Because that’s the line. That’s the moment when you decide whether you’re going to lead with integrity or script a fake redemption arc just to cover your own plot holes.

    Be honest. Be clear. If someone’s not meeting expectations, tell them—with support, with context, with a plan. Don’t dress it up in “opportunities for growth” if what you really mean is “we’re already interviewing your replacement.” If you’re a GM and a player is being disruptive or needs to shift how they engage at the table, don’t write it into the story like some kind of Saw-style morality lesson. Talk to them. You are allowed to be direct. You are allowed to be kind without being vague. You are allowed to be uncomfortable if it means being real.

    Because people know. They always know. The party knows when the GM has it out for them. Employees know when they’ve been moved to the short bench. And when trust breaks—when the coaching turns out to be a trap, when the feedback was just foreshadowing—it doesn’t just ruin one person’s experience. It poisons the whole table. It tells everyone else that growth is conditional. That failure is fatal. That support is a trick.

    And once people believe that, you don’t get innovation. You don’t get loyalty. You get silence.

    You get a campaign where nobody tries anything bold. A job where nobody brings up new ideas. A team that’s still technically alive, but spiritually checked out, like NPCs waiting for the next cutscene.

    So if you’re going to be a leader, be one. Don’t hand people a torch just to light their fuse. Don’t offer them a side quest when you’ve already decided how the story ends. And don’t call it feedback if it’s really just foreshadowing.

    We already know the trap is coming. The only question is whether you’ll pretend it was part of our development plan all along.

    Citations:

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

    Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational Leadership (2nd ed.). Psychology Press.

    Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

  • You Don’t Need to Know Everything—Just Stop Faking It

    There’s a particular kind of boss that’s worse than just a micromanager. It’s the kind who micromanages badly—hovering over tasks they don’t actually understand, second-guessing decisions with no context, inserting themselves into workflows like a toddler grabbing the steering wheel from the backseat. At least a competent micromanager might know what they’re interrupting. But this flavor of leader doesn’t know the work, won’t admit it, and compensates by managing through vague questions, performative stress, and ominous calendar invites titled “Touch Base.” If you’ve never had a boss like that, congratulations on your peaceful life. The rest of us are still flinching every time someone asks if we “have a minute.”

    I’ve worked under those managers, and—cards on the table—I’ve been one, too. Not in the mustache-twirling villain sense, but in the more common and less cinematic way: I got put in charge of something I didn’t totally understand, so I backed off too far because I didn’t want to come across like a dumbass. That’s the inverse version of the same mistake. Instead of meddling, I ghosted. I figured giving people space was the respectful thing to do, when what they actually needed was presence. Not command. Not control. Just the sense that I was there, paying attention, invested, and ready to help.

    Running a team without understanding their work is like Game Mastering a system you’ve never read. You might be able to fake it for a session or two. Maybe you’ve got the vibe down—narrating like Matt Mercer on half-speed, throwing in enough “roll for initiative” moments to keep everyone entertained. But sooner or later, your players are going to do something mechanical. They’ll try to shove a goblin off a bridge, or cast a spell that interacts with a system you didn’t prep, or—God help you—start asking about grappling rules. And now you’re scrambling through the Player’s Handbook like it’s a cursed tome, bluffing your way through it while everyone quietly starts texting under the table. Because nothing kills trust like a GM who pretends to know things they clearly don’t.

    Leadership theory has a name for this balancing act: Situational Leadership. Hersey and Blanchard laid it out in the late ’60s, but the idea still hits. It says your leadership style should adapt based on how competent and confident your team is at a given task. Some people need direction. Others need support. Some just need you to get out of the way and let them work. But the only way to figure that out is to actually know where they’re at. And that requires something micromanagers and absentee leaders alike tend to skip: asking questions and listening to the answers.

    Most micromanagers don’t think they’re micromanaging. They think they’re doing due diligence. Staying informed. “Driving results.” But what they’re actually doing is disrupting Self-Determination Theory—a cornerstone of motivation research that says people thrive when they feel autonomous, competent, and connected. Micromanaging undercuts autonomy. But if you also don’t know the work, it undercuts competence too—yours and theirs. You’re not just in the way; you’re actively creating friction, the same way a GM does when they override the bard’s plan just because they didn’t understand how Bardic Inspiration stacks.

    And on the flip side, disappearing because you don’t understand the work doesn’t help either. That just makes people feel unsupported, especially when things start going sideways. It’s the equivalent of a GM saying, “Well, that’s what your character would do,” and then zoning out on their phone while the players roleplay around them. Sure, you’re not interrupting, but you’re also not engaged. You’ve become the leadership version of ambient tavern music.

    So how do you do it better?

    You get curious. You name what you don’t know. You ask your team what they need from you today, not just what they needed when the project started. You ask, “What am I doing that’s helpful?” and brace yourself for the silence that might follow. You sit with it. Then you try again.

    You stop treating questions like traps and start using them like torches. You stop assuming that being “the boss” means you have to be the expert. And you realize that your credibility doesn’t come from having all the answers—it comes from helping the people who do their best work.

    If you’re running a campaign and you don’t know every mechanic, that’s fine. But don’t fake it. Bring in a co-GM, hand off to someone more familiar with the system, or prep more next time. In the moment, the best thing you can do is own it. Say, “I don’t actually know how this rule works—can you walk me through it?” And suddenly, you’ve transformed from an authority figure faking competence into a leader modeling collaboration.

    When you’re a leader and you don’t know the work, your job isn’t to disappear. And it’s not to overcorrect by smothering your team with bad advice. Your job is to learn just enough to be useful, to ask the right questions, and to create an environment where people feel like they can do their thing without you pretending to be the expert on everything. Because when people know you’ve got their back—not their keyboard—that’s when trust actually starts to build.

    And the next time you do have to give direction, it won’t sound like interference. It’ll sound like support.

    Citations:

    Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

    Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K.H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training & Development Journal, 23(5), 26–34.