Corporate leaders who treat long hours and little sleep as proof of dedication are modeling the wrong behavior for their teams, ServiceNow president and chief financial officer Gina Mastantuono said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California.
Mastantuono pointed to a persistent workplace belief that working 14-hour days on four hours of sleep demonstrates the hardest effort and the greatest merit. «And in fact, that is such a terrible example for the people around us,» she said in a conversation with Alicia Hatch, U.S. sports chief commercial officer and women's sports leader at Deloitte.
Her argument draws on a sports metaphor that has become common in boardrooms: the push to get a project across the finish line or raise workplace standards. But Mastantuono said business has not carried over the value athletes place on rest. While the importance of recovery has entered popular culture outside athletics, she said, it has not fully permeated the vocabulary or daily habits of senior executives.
«Recovery is part of the performance; it's not secondary,» Mastantuono said. She compared the human body to an athlete's training regimen, noting that muscle does not grow during a workout at the gym but during sleep at night, when the body repairs itself.
The research she cited supports that view. A University of Florida meta-analysis of nearly 200 studies found that recovery from work is associated with better sleep, improved mental health and greater long-term satisfaction with life. Still, Mastantuono acknowledged that knowing rest matters and actually internalizing it are different things, particularly for leaders who have built careers around visible exertion.
She described the benefits in her own work. A better work-life balance, she said, has sharpened her ability to listen rather than react and to stay calm under pressure, which in turn has helped her teams execute more effectively. «When we do focus on taking care of ourselves, then we are much better bosses, much better colleagues, much better parents,» she said.
The panel also brought a perspective from elite sport. Janet Evans, a four-time Olympic medalist in swimming and chief athlete officer of LA28, the organizing committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, is well versed in the role of recovery in competition but said she has needed reminders to take a breather herself.
Evans recalled LA28 chief executive Reynold Hoover, a former three-star U.S. Army lieutenant general who often uses military language in office conversations, offering a practical calibration of workplace urgency. «No one's guns are drawn. No one is shooting each other,» she quoted Hoover as saying. «So Janet, you're gonna figure this out tomorrow.»
The discussion lands at a moment when companies are weighing productivity demands against employee burnout and retention. Mastantuono's message was not that leaders should work less in the abstract, but that the example they set shapes the habits of everyone around them. A culture that rewards visible exhaustion, she suggested, can undermine the sustained performance it claims to celebrate.
For executives, the practical takeaway is that rest belongs in the operating model rather than at its margins. Mastantuono framed recovery as a leadership skill, one that supports clearer judgment and steadier teams, and one that senior managers can demonstrate simply by refusing to glorify the 14-hour day.