Don’t Turn Into a Robot

When you’re a founder, your nervous system gets rewired.

You start the day on a high after closing a deal, crash by lunch from a curveball email, hit another high by dinner, and still lie awake at night overthinking something you said in a meeting 6 weeks ago.
This is your new baseline: chaos.

At some point, you get better at riding the wave. You learn to compartmentalize. To breathe through the turbulence. To not let the emotions drive the car. And you should — because your team needs stability, not a panic attack in a hoodie.

But here’s the catch:

In learning to be emotionally immune, don’t become inhumane.

‍

The Line You Can’t Cross

Being emotionally strong is a requirement of leadership.
But empathy? That’s a requirement of moral leadership.

There’s a dangerous trend I’ve seen in a few founders and execs.
They confuse resilience with apathy.
They see detachment as strategy.
And they forget there are actual people on the other side of those spreadsheets.

Case in point:
A friend of mine’s mom recently went in for a quadruple bypass surgery. Serious stuff. Doctor’s orders: 3 months of recovery.

You know what her company sent her during this?
R380.

Let me help translate that. That’s about $20.Twenty. Dollars.
For someone recovering from heart surgery.
And to make things worse? She’s scared she won’t even have a job to come back to.

That’s not emotionally immune leadership.
That’s just leadership with no soul.

‍

The People Make the Vision

Here’s something I’ve had to remind myself constantly:

Your people are the reason your vision is even possible.

The best systems, the sleekest branding, the sharpest pitch deck — none of it matters if the people behind it don’t feel respected, safe, and supported.

At Nexubis, we’ve worked hard to build a high-performance culture — but one rooted in care.
We push. We challenge. We move fast.
But we also check in. We allow for being human.
We want people to grow — not break.

I’ve written before about firing fast, promoting faster, and building leadership from within.
But the secret sauce behind all of it?
Respect.
We don’t just demand excellence. We invest in it.

And if you lose sight of that — if your KPIs matter more than your people — don’t be surprised when loyalty starts to fade, quality dips, and culture quietly rots.

‍

You Can Be Tough and Still Be Trusted

You can be a hard-ass.
You can have high standards.
You can even be brutally honest.

But you still need to be human.

Some of the most respected leaders I’ve met are terrifyingly competent — but they’ve never made their people feel like cogs. They build with them, not on top of them.

You’ll earn more respect by having someone’s back in their hardest season than you ever will by squeezing them dry and cutting them loose the second their performance dips.

Because here’s the reality:
You don’t get to build a big dream on the backs of broken people.

So yeah. Be strong.
Build emotional resilience.
But never — never — forget your humanity.

That’s the kind of founder worth following.