You can love your job. Be surrounded by brilliant people. Believe in what your company is building.
And still come home completely exhausted.
It’s a strange contradiction, isn’t it?
We’ve spent years working on employee engagement, workplace culture, and creating environments where people can do their best work. Yet even people who care deeply about their jobs, including leaders themselves, can struggle to sustain their energy.
It raises a question we’ve been reflecting on for some time:
Have we become so focused on achieving success that we’ve forgotten what it should feel like along the way?
It’s a question at the heart of our new podcast, The Human Success Show.
Winning shouldn’t come at the expense of people
In our first episode, we reflected on an experience from Nina’s childhood that offers a surprisingly relevant leadership lesson.
At 12, she led a team at scout camp. She was determined to win, and she did. But looking back, neither she nor the rest of the team particularly enjoyed the experience.
As Nina put it:
“Winning is nothing if you don’t do it as a team.”
That lesson carries into our professional lives.
From Robin’s experience building high-performing teams at Salesforce, Box, and LinkedIn to Nina’s years working in HR leadership across tech startups, we’ve seen what extraordinary teams can achieve together. We’ve also witnessed how quickly ambition can turn into unhealthy competition and internal politics.
We both believe that kindness and high performance belong together.
Compassionate leadership means making difficult decisions while remaining mindful of their impact on people. The way we achieve success matters.
The invisible pressure to keep up
The pace of change has added another layer of pressure to our working lives.
Even before AI, work was becoming increasingly complex. Now organizations are reconsidering how they operate, the skills they need, and how people will work alongside rapidly evolving technology.
Meanwhile, someone on LinkedIn has apparently automated their entire workweek, while you’re still exploring how AI fits into your own role. Suddenly, meaningful progress can feel inadequate.
We’ve experienced this at Zensai, too. With AI evolving so quickly, it’s easy for individuals and organizations alike to feel they’re falling behind.
Our CTO and VP of Development mapped out the stages of AI maturity, helping our teams understand where we stood and where we needed to go. That clarity helped remove some of the pressure to chase an imaginary finish line.
One of the most valuable things leaders can offer their teams right now is perspective.
What gives you energy?
There’s a question we believe deserves more attention in conversations about employee engagement:
What part of your work actually gives you energy?
We’ve challenged each other on this over the years, particularly when we’ve become so focused on solving problems that we’ve lost sight of where we can make the greatest impact.
We explored this through Nina’s experience of using AI to build a product demo at Zensai. Creating something herself brought a renewed sense of motivation, to the point where she didn’t want to put her computer down.
As she reflected in our conversation:
“I should probably go back to what is it that gives me energy.”
It’s a powerful reminder of how much energy comes from learning, creating, and making meaningful progress.
We also reflected on the people who have shaped our careers. Robin spoke about the leaders and mentors who believed in him and helped him develop throughout his time in the tech industry.
It’s one reason we’re excited about AI’s potential to make personalized coaching and development more accessible.
Technology creates new opportunities, but the decisions we make as leaders will determine how that potential is realized.
What does human success really mean?
We don’t pretend to have all the answers.
But our experiences across HR, technology, and business leadership have reinforced a shared belief:
People and businesses should be able to succeed together. And the way we achieve that success matters.
For leaders, that begins with understanding what motivates people, what drains their energy, and whether the environments we’re creating help them perform at their best.
That’s what we’re setting out to explore in Season 1 of The Human Success Show.
We’re curious about what makes people successful, what gets in their way, and whether we’ve been measuring success by the right things all along.
Through conversations with leaders, researchers, and people who’ve performed at the highest levels, we hope to challenge some of our own assumptions and discover new perspectives along the way.
We’ll leave you with the same question we’ll be asking every guest:
What does human success mean to you?
Watch or listen to Episode 1 of The Human Success Show as we begin our quest for human success.
