Evan Wittenberg has spent his career inside the hardest part of HR: the part where senior leaders are themselves running on fumes, where company growth keeps adding pressure, and where the people responsible for sustaining everyone else are the ones least likely to take care of themselves. As EVP and Chief People Officer at Ancestry, leading HR for a global company with more than 1,500 employees and over a billion dollars in annual revenue, Evan brought a senior operating perspective to his Reimagining Company Culture conversation. The theme was renewal, recovery, and the leadership practice of treating recharge as a strategic input.
His vantage point matters. Evan has helped guide a privately held company through fast growth, which means he has watched what happens to senior teams that try to sustain peak intensity for too long. The most useful part of the conversation was his honesty about how easy it is for leaders to ignore their own limits, and how visible the consequences become inside the executive bench when they do.
Why Recharge Is a Leadership Discipline
The cultural narrative that effective leaders sleep little and work always has not aged well. Harvard Business Review research on managerial burnout finds that more than half of managers report being burned out, and the higher up the org chart, the more those leaders set the pace for everyone below them. Gallup's research on burnout consistently shows that the recovery patterns of senior leaders shape recovery patterns across the entire organization, often more than any policy.
Evan's framing was that recovery is a leadership skill. The leaders who learn to recharge are the ones who can keep performing at high levels over years rather than seasons. The ones who do not eventually crash, either visibly through resignation or invisibly through declining judgment that costs the company in subtler ways.
What Renewal Actually Looks Like at Senior Levels
How do you take real time off when the company never stops?
Evan's view is that real time off requires real handoff. Senior leaders who never delegate decision rights cannot actually disconnect. The work of preparing for a recharge week (clear handoffs, named decision-makers, documented context) is also the work of building a more resilient leadership team. The benefits compound beyond the individual leader.
What about leaders who feel guilty about taking time off?
Reframe it. The leader who never takes time off is teaching the rest of the company that recovery is unsafe. That cultural signal often does more damage than the individual leader's exhaustion. Taking visible recovery time is not a personal indulgence. It is part of the leader's job.
What Actually Works for Leadership Renewal
Principle 1: Build recovery into the operating rhythm
The companies that get this right treat sabbatical leave and structured recharge time as scheduled inputs, not optional perks. Senior leaders take time off in predictable patterns. Teams plan around it. The system absorbs absences without drama because absences are expected and well-prepared for.
Principle 2: Make leader recovery visible
If the executive team treats vacation as a quiet, unspoken thing, employees assume it is suspect. If leaders openly share that they will be offline for a recovery week, talk about it afterward, and encourage their teams to do the same, the cultural signal flips. Recovery becomes a normal part of high performance rather than a hidden compromise.
Principle 3: Use recovery to surface what is broken
If a leader cannot take a real week off without the system collapsing, the system has a design problem. Rather than ignoring it, leaders should treat unsuccessful recovery attempts as diagnostic data. AllVoices' pulse surveys and HR case management capabilities help organizations surface the patterns that show where reliance on individual heroism is masking structural fragility.
Where Culture and Wellness Fit
Renewal sits inside broader work on human resources and company culture. The teams that build recharge into culture do so deliberately. Wellness programs, sick leave, and bereavement leave are part of a connected system that treats human limits as a real constraint rather than a personal weakness to be managed around.
How HR supports leader recharge
HR's role is to make recharge structurally easier. That means investing in succession depth, building decision-rights frameworks that allow real handoff, and tracking utilization data to ensure the policies are actually being used. Succession planning work that focuses on continuity through normal time off, not just emergency exits, makes the rest of the system more resilient.
Frequently Asked Questions About Renewing and Recharging
How much time off do senior leaders actually need?
More than they take, less than they think the company can spare. Most senior leaders report meaningful recharge benefits from blocks of two to three weeks at a time, not just long weekends. The depth of recovery comes from extended disconnect, not from frequent fragments.
What about leaders who travel constantly?
Travel is not recovery. The leaders who think they recharge through quarterly vacations between constant travel are usually mistaken. Recovery requires actual disconnection, not just a different location.
How do you build a culture where recharge is normalized?
From the top, deliberately, with visible behavior. Cultures of overwork are usually started by a few visible leaders who model 80-hour weeks. Cultures of sustainable performance require the same visible modeling of healthy boundaries.
What is the cost of underinvesting in leader recovery?
Higher senior turnover, slower decision quality, more interpersonal conflict at the top, and worse strategic judgment over time. The costs are real but slow, which is why they tend to compound before anyone names them.
Should companies mandate time off?
Sometimes. Companies that have struggled with utilization have used minimum vacation requirements with success. The tool is blunt, but the cultural signal is clear: time off is part of how this company operates, not an extra.
How do you handle senior leaders who refuse to take real time off?
With direct conversation and clear expectations from the CEO or board. Senior leaders who never disconnect are usually creating downstream problems they do not see, including succession depth issues and team burnout. The intervention is often a structured conversation about what the company actually needs from senior leaders over a multi-year horizon, not a wellness pitch. Sustainable senior leadership requires real recovery, and the leaders most resistant to that idea are usually the ones the company can least afford to lose to exhaustion.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Evan's senior operating perspective makes a useful argument. Renewal is not a soft topic. It is a leadership discipline that determines whether companies sustain performance or burn through their best people. The companies that get this right invest in the structural enablers (succession depth, decision rights, recovery norms, visible leader behavior) that turn recharge from individual willpower into a real organizational capability.
The deeper point is that recovery and performance are not opposites. They are two halves of the same equation. Leaders who treat them that way build organizations that can keep growing without grinding their people into the ground. The HR teams that support that work end up serving as quiet architects of long-term resilience, which is what most companies actually need from their people function.
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