"We’re Not Doing That”: A Wake-Up Call for Every HR Leader

 When the executive team shuts down training expansion, it’s not always resistance — sometimes, it’s realism.

A colleague of mine was in a CEO peer group this week, and she came back with a story that stopped me cold.

She said one of the CEOs — who runs a major financial institution — shared what happened during a recent leadership meeting. His HR team had come in to present a proposal. The idea? Expand their current compliance training platform to include leadership development content. Add a few more modules. More learning. More options.

The HR team delivered the pitch, thanked the room, and left.

And then the CEO said something that made everyone in the peer group lean in.

“As soon as they walked out, the executive team turned to me and said, ‘We are NOT doing that. We’re already stuck doing the compliance stuff. We’re not adding more of this sht.’”*

Oof.

You could feel the collective wince. Not because they were wrong — but because they were right.

The Problem Isn’t Training Fatigue. It’s Training Failure.

This wasn’t a team rejecting leadership development. This was a team rejecting more of the same.

More of the clicking.
More of the boxed-in learning modules.
More hours lost to content that doesn’t connect — and definitely doesn’t change behavior.

It’s not about the topic. It’s about the experience.

And in that boardroom, the message was loud and clear:
If we’re going to do leadership training, it better not look like the compliance system.

HR's Tempting Trap: The Easy Button

Let’s be honest — it’s tempting.

You already have a platform. You can add more modules. You’ve got budget leftover and vendors lined up.

You hit publish, check the box, and roll out another layer.

But here’s the thing:

If the current system isn’t working, adding more to it doesn’t solve the problem.
It multiplies it.

As my colleague put it, “We keep stacking bricks on a cracked foundation and wondering why the house won’t hold.”

So What Does Work?

Gamification.

No, not gimmicks. Not cartoon trophies. Not “fun” for fun’s sake.

Real gamification.

The kind that taps into psychology. Triggers dopamine. Builds emotional memory.

The kind that replaces passive learning with active problem-solving — and makes people want to come back for more.

It doesn’t look like training.

It looks like action. It feels like relevance. It works.

We Don’t Need to Add More. We Need to Add Different.

The executive team wasn’t asking for less growth. They were asking for less garbage.

Because they’ve sat through the platforms.
They’ve watched the videos.
They’ve taken the multiple-choice quizzes and forgotten them by lunch.

What they’re hungry for — and what your people are, too — is learning that actually sticks.
Learning that earns their time.

And that’s what gamified training does.

A Moment of Real Talk for All of Us

If you’re in HR, L&D, or OD — you’ve probably been in that HR team’s shoes.
You built the deck. You had the right intentions. You wanted to drive development.

But if your rollout plan sounds like “...and we’ll just add it to the current platform,” pause.

Ask yourself:

• Does this system actually engage our people?

• Would you want to take the training you’re offering?

• Is this an experience, or just more noise?

Because in today’s world, noise doesn’t get funded.
But outcomes do.

Want to get a yes in your next pitch? Don’t propose more modules.
Propose a transformation.

Gamification might just be the difference between eye-rolls and buy-in.