Most HR training materials are about as fun as filling out a W-4. PowerPoint slides, corporate jargon, maybe a role-play exercise that makes everyone cringe. No wonder nobody remembers the training when it actually matters.
But stories? Stories stick.
That’s why anime has such staying power. It takes messy, universal truths about people (growth, fear, ambition, teamwork) and packages them into characters we root for. You may not shoot laser beams out of your hands like Goku, but the struggles in Dragon Ball? The exhaustion in Solo Leveling? The disorientation of Chihiro in Spirited Away? HR leaders live their own versions of those every week.
So let’s talk about what anime tropes can teach us about being better HR leaders in 2025, and we’ll even do it without all the filler episodes.
Dragon Ball: Powering Up Doesn’t Happen Overnight
If you’ve watched Dragon Ball Z, you know Goku doesn’t wake up one morning and decide, “Today I’ll be a Super Saiyan.” He trains until he’s bruised, humiliated, and half-broken. Every battle pushes him past a limit he thought was fixed.
Here’s the HR parallel: we often expect employees to “go Super Saiyan” after a single training session. New hire? Fully ramped in 90 days. Manager training? Instant culture shift. Coaching conversation? Problem solved.
It doesn’t work that way.
Real growth takes repetition, setbacks, and encouragement. Employees need time and space to level up. Managers need mentorship, not just a PDF of best practices. And when someone stumbles, that’s not failure, it’s part of the arc.
The Dragon Ball lesson: Stop treating development like a checkbox. Treat it like a saga. When you invest for the long arc, you don’t just get employees who know more, you get employees who are battle-tested, resilient, and ready to transform when the organization needs them most.
Solo Leveling: The Grind is Real, But Not Everyone Sees It
In Solo Leveling, Sung Jin-Woo starts as the weakest hunter alive. People dismiss him, mock him, and treat him like dead weight. But then he unlocks a system that lets him train in secret, grinding away until he’s unrecognizable.
What’s striking is that most of his peers don’t see the grind. They only see the results. One day he’s the “weakest,” and the next he’s blowing past everyone. The endless training, the bruises, the failures? Invisible.
Employees go through the same thing. They’re learning new tools after hours, practicing communication in the mirror, building leadership skills quietly, and if nobody notices, it’s demoralizing. From the outside, it looks like “overnight success.” From the inside, it’s months of unseen work.
The HR takeaway:
- Build feedback loops that catch effort, not just output.
- Notice the quiet grinders. Sometimes the biggest growth is the least visible.
- Reward persistence, not just flash.
Sung Jin-Woo reminds us that behind every breakthrough employee is a mountain of invisible effort. As HR leaders, we should be the ones who see it, name it, and reward it.
Spirited Away: Culture Shock is Real
Remember Chihiro in Spirited Away? She stumbles into a spirit world where everyone else knows the rules, but they’re rules she can’t even begin to comprehend right off the bat. There are rituals, expectations, unspoken codes. She’s terrified of messing up and desperate just to survive.
That’s onboarding at half the companies I’ve seen.
New hires walk in and people assume they’ll “figure it out.” Meanwhile, the rules are unwritten, the acronyms sound like another language, and the culture feels like an inside joke they weren’t invited to. Some survive it, but many don’t.
Onboarding isn’t paperwork. It’s orientation into a new world.
The Spirited Away lesson:
- Pair new hires with actual humans who can explain the unwritten rules.
- Translate jargon from the beginning; don’t just assume they’ll catch on with use.
- Create space for “dumb” questions that aren’t treated as dumb.
Otherwise? People spend their first months surviving instead of thriving. And survival mode is a terrible way to start a career.
What Anime Doesn’t Teach HR
Let’s pump the brakes for a second. Not every anime trope belongs in leadership. Some things work in fiction, but would be a disaster in the workplace.
Overwork ≠ heroism.
Sorry, Goku, but pulling all-nighters in the gravity chamber isn’t healthy. Anime often glorifies pushing past human limits (looking at you, Rock Lee, training until collapse), but in real workplaces, glorifying burnout kills retention. HR’s role is to set boundaries that keep employees sustainable, not encourage them to “nearly die for the mission.”
Villains don’t need to be obliterated.
In anime, the Big Bad often gets vaporized, sealed away, or banished to another dimension. But in HR, “problem employees” usually need coaching first before any permanent solutions are implemented. Sometimes what looks like villainy is actually a skills gap, burnout, or poor fit for the role. You can’t Kamehameha your way out of conflict. More often than not, the right move is feedback, support, and a performance plan before jumping all the way to termination.
Big speeches don’t fix everything.
Shōnen protagonists love a dramatic monologue that changes hearts and minds (think Naruto’s endless “talk-no-jutsu” that turns enemies into allies). But in HR, the best conversations aren’t delivered to a crowd, they’re the quiet one-on-ones where trust is built and expectations are clarified. Inspiration is nice, but consistent follow-through is better.
Transformation arcs don’t happen overnight.
Anime makes growth look like a sudden power-up (Deku unlocking a new quirk, Tanjiro learning Water Breathing overnight). In real life, employees don’t return from one training seminar magically “leveled up.” HR leaders have to design long-term development paths and measure incremental progress, not expect overnight miracles.
Not every rival is out to destroy you.
In anime, rivals push each other through constant tension (think Vegeta vs. Goku). But fostering rivalry at work without guardrails can create toxicity. HR shouldn’t encourage employees to one-up each other at the expense of teamwork. Competition has to be healthy, framed as “iron sharpens iron,” not “Vegeta sulks while Goku smiles.”
Hero worship doesn’t scale.
Many anime stories orbit around one unstoppable protagonist (Ichigo in Bleach, Saitama in One Punch Man). In workplaces, betting everything on one superstar is dangerous. HR leaders need to build systems and teams, not hope a single “hero employee” will carry the organization.
Anime is fun. HR is real life. The stories are inspiring, but part of leadership is knowing where to stop borrowing from fiction and start designing for reality.
So, Why Bother With Anime in HR?
Because metaphors matter. If you tell a manager, “You need to develop employees consistently with feedback and support,” they’ll nod politely, maybe even write it down… and then forget it by lunch.
But if you say, “Stop expecting people to go Super Saiyan overnight. Development is Dragon Ball arcs, not quick fixes,”? That image doesn’t leave. They’ll remember it the next time they’re frustrated with a new hire who's power level is not yet over 9000.
That’s the power of anime in HR. It takes abstract truths, growth, teamwork and resilience, and makes them vivid. Memorable. Hard to shake.
And let’s be honest, corporate training could use more of that. Nobody’s inspired by a stock photo of two people shaking hands. But everybody, anime fan or not, understands the underdog who refuses to quit, the mentor who invests in others, the rival who sharpens your edge, and the team that’s stronger together than they ever could be alone.
So next time you’re running a workshop or building out leadership training, skip the clipart. Borrow from stories people already love. Because whether your managers watch anime or not, they’ll recognize the tropes, and they’ll carry the lessons long after the training ends.
Ready to turn your managers into main-character material?
Faulkner HR Solutions builds leadership training that actually levels up capability — no filler episodes, no buzzword bloat.
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Why Listen to Me
Because I don’t just watch the arcs — I build them.
I’ve spent years turning chaotic HR functions into structured development systems that actually work. As an HR and organizational strategist, I’ve seen what happens when leadership training is treated like a one-off episode instead of a long-running series: the characters don’t grow, the plot stalls, and the organization loses its main cast.
At Faulkner HR Solutions, I design training that sticks because it’s built like good storytelling: there’s tension, character development, and payoff. Employees don’t need another compliance slideshow. They need mentorship, feedback loops, and clarity that evolves with every “season.”