ServiceNow president and Chief Financial Officer Gina Mastantuono warned that corporate leaders who brag about working 14-hour days and sleeping just four hours establish a harmful standard for their workforce. Speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, California, Mastantuono stated that such habits project toxic expectations onto surrounding employees.
The Bottom Line
- The Executive Standard: ServiceNow president and CFO Gina Mastantuono criticized leaders who boast about 14-hour workdays and four-hour sleep schedules for setting a dangerous cultural benchmark.
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The Performance Science: Citing physiological reality, Mastantuono emphasized that physical and mental recovery is a fundamental prerequisite for high-level professional execution.
- The Military Parallel: LA28 chief athlete officer Janet Evans highlighted similar cultural shifts, citing CEO Reynold Hoover’s reminder that corporate crises lack the lethal stakes of military combat.
Challenging the Corporate Martyrdom Narrative
Corporate culture has long borrowed metaphors from athletics to drive project execution, yet executives frequently fail to adopt the counterpart to physical exertion: structured rest. Mastantuono addressed this disconnect during her discussion with Alicia Hatch, U.S. Sports chief commercial officer and women’s sports leader at Deloitte.
“There’s always been this—if you have to work 14-hour days and you get four hours sleep, and that shows that you’re working the hardest and you deserve the most,” Mastantuono said. “And in fact, that is such a terrible example for the people around us.”
Academic research reinforces this operational view. A University of Florida meta-analysis examining nearly 200 studies demonstrated a clear correlation between structured work recovery, enhanced sleep quality, improved mental health, and long-term life satisfaction. Despite these findings, executives routinely struggle to internalize rest as an operational asset rather than a secondary luxury.
Framing Recovery as a Performance Multiplier
Mastantuono positioned downtime as an essential component of executive capability rather than an absence of work. “Recovery is part of the performance; it’s not secondary,” she noted, drawing an explicit parallel to physical training. “Muscle doesn’t grow when we pump out at the gym. It grows when we’re sleeping at night and letting the muscles recover.”
For her own leadership practice, prioritizing recovery has refined her capacity to listen rather than react impulsively. Maintaining calm under heavy operational pressure allows her teams to execute enterprise objectives with greater precision.
“When we do focus on taking care of ourselves, then we are much better bosses, much better colleagues, much better parents,” Mastantuono said.
Calibrating Pressure in High-Stakes Planning
Janet Evans, a four-time Olympic medalist and chief athlete officer for LA28—the organizing committee for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles—shared parallel observations about the necessity of intentional breathing room in elite environments. Evans discussed leadership philosophy with Hatch regarding LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover.
Hoover, a three-star ex-U.S. Army Lieutenant General, regularly brings military perspective into civilian administrative environments to manage organizational anxiety.
“No one’s guns are drawn. No one is shooting each other,” Evans recalled Hoover telling his team. “So Janet, you’re gonna figure this out tomorrow.”
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
