Workers rarely emerge from union recognition campaigns unchanged. During union recognition campaigns, workers often become informed, empowered, confident leaders. This is especially true of workers who support the unionization effort. In this article, we draw upon 153 in-depth interviews with workers and organizers in order to answer two questions: how do organizers facilitate workers' personal transformations and how gendered is this process? Our analysis of our dataset generated three findings. First, the organizers in our dataset used personal relationships, empathy, and pushing to help workers change from uninformed, fearful followers to knowledgeable, confident workplace leaders. Second, many of the organizers in our dataset experienced their own personal transformation during union recognition campaigns. They became pushers, organizers who are comfortable with confrontation, by connecting to their own anger, tapping into their emotional strength, and getting help from supervisors and coworkers. Finally, we uncovered limited evidence for the gendered nature of union organizing. Gender did not appear to shape the workers in our dataset's perceptions of organizers, nor did it shape how the organizers in our dataset became pushers.