Gina Mastantuono, president and chief financial officer of ServiceNow, has been pushing back against a culture among senior executives that treats exhaustion as a badge of honor. She argues that leaders who brag about 14 hour days and four hours of sleep are setting a damaging example for everyone who reports to them, saying plainly that working that way and calling it normal "is such a terrible example" to set.
Mastantuono frames the issue less as a wellness talking point and more as a performance one. "Recovery is part of the performance, it's not secondary," she has said, drawing a direct line to how athletes train. Muscle does not build itself during a workout, she points out, it builds afterward while the body is at rest, and she argues executives who chase output without ever building in recovery are skipping the half of the process that actually produces results.
She credits her own shift toward better balance with concrete changes in how she leads, saying it has made her a sharper listener, steadier under pressure, and more effective at getting her team to execute. In her telling, leaders who manage their own recovery end up being better bosses, better colleagues, and better parents as a result, not just better rested employees.
