Why Leadership's Favorite Holiday Message Reveals a Broken Philosophy of Work

Every holiday season, without fail, the same message echoes through corporate communications: “Take this time to rest and recharge. Come back with full energy.”

It sounds thoughtful. It sounds caring. It sounds like leadership that values employee wellbeing.

It’s none of these things.

What this message actually reveals, when you examine it through the lens of organizational psychology and leadership theory, is a deeply flawed, extractive philosophy of work that we’ve somehow normalized. And it’s time we interrogated it.

The Implicit Contract Hidden in Plain Sight

When a leader tells employees to “recharge so you can come back energized,” they’re exposing an assumption baked into how they conceptualize the employment relationship: work depletes you, and recovery is your responsibility on your own time.

Read that again.

The organization extracts. You restore. The organization drains. You replenish. And then we repeat the cycle until you retire, burn out, or leave.

This framing treats employees as batteries—consumable energy sources whose maintenance happens off the clock. It’s a transactional, extractive model dressed up in the language of care. “Take care of yourself” becomes “maintain yourself as a productive asset.” The holiday, in this framing, doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the organization’s productivity pipeline. You’re just borrowing it to perform necessary maintenance.

The Kantian Problem No One Talks About

There’s a philosophical dimension here that deserves attention.

Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative offers us a fundamental ethical principle: treat people as ends in themselves, never merely as means to an end. Human beings have intrinsic dignity and worth that exists independent of their utility to others.

The “recharge” framing violates this principle entirely.

When leadership positions your holiday as preparation for renewed productivity, they’re instrumentalizing your time off. Your rest becomes a means to organizational ends. Your recuperation exists in service of the company’s goals, not your humanity. Notice what the “recharge” message doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “spend meaningful time with people you love.” It doesn’t say “pursue whatever brings you joy.” It doesn’t say “live your life fully, because life is short and precious.”

It says rest—a word that is passive, recuperative, and fundamentally preparatory. Rest for what? For the next extraction cycle.

This is selfishness masquerading as concern. And we’ve become so accustomed to it that we send thank-you notes in response.

What If I Don’t Want to Recharge?

Here’s a question that this framing cannot accommodate: What if I want to spend energy during my holiday rather than conserve it?

What if I want to use my time off for an adventure that leaves me physically exhausted but spiritually renewed? What if I want to pour myself into my children, fully present and fully engaged, rather than lying on a couch “recharging” for work’s benefit? What if my family deserves my energy more than my employer does?

The “recharge” paradigm has no room for this. It assumes your energy is a resource that belongs, ultimately, to the organization—and that responsible employees will manage that resource wisely by resting when permitted. But my energy is mine. My time is mine. And if I choose to spend my holiday in a state of joyful exhaustion with people I love, that’s not a failure to properly maintain the corporate asset. That’s called living.

The Research Says Something Different

Let’s move from philosophy to evidence.

The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model is one of the most influential frameworks in occupational health psychology. It acknowledges a basic reality: work creates demands that require recovery. Cognitive load, emotional labor, time pressure—these things accumulate and deplete our resources. But here’s what leaders consistently miss about this model: the implication isn’t that better vacations solve the problem.

The implication is that we should design work that doesn’t chronically deplete people in the first place. The JD-R model emphasizes the resources side of the equation—autonomy, social support, feedback, opportunities for development. When these resources are present and sufficient, they buffer against demands. They can even transform demanding work into engaging work.

The model doesn’t say “drain people and let them recover on weekends.” It says “build environments where demands and resources are balanced, where work is sustainable, where depletion isn’t the default state.” Leaders who focus on recovery have fundamentally misunderstood the science they think they’re applying.

What If Work Could Recharge You?

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, offers an even more radical possibility. SDT identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy (the need to feel in control of your own behavior), competence (the need to feel effective and capable), and relatedness (the need for meaningful connection with others). When work satisfies these needs, something remarkable happens: work doesn’t just avoid draining people. It actually generates energy.

This isn’t utopian speculation. It’s documented in decades of research across industries and cultures. People leave some workdays more energized than they arrived. They experience what psychologists call “vitality”, a sense of aliveness and enthusiasm that spills over into other domains of life.

So when a leader defaults to “recover on your holiday,” they’re implicitly admitting they’ve given up on this possibility. They’ve accepted depleting work environments as inevitable rather than asking the harder question: Why are we designing work that requires recovery? What if you could create an environment where work itself recharges people? What if showing up on Monday felt less like returning to the extraction facility and more like engaging with something meaningful?

That would require actually rethinking how we structure work. The “recharge” message requires nothing, just an email.

The Performance of Care

There’s something deeply performative about the holiday recharge message, and it’s worth naming.

The leader who sends the “make sure you rest and recharge” email often presides over the very culture that created the depletion. They manage the unrealistic deadlines, the understaffed teams, the back-to-back meetings, the “quick” requests that arrive at 6 PM on Friday. And then, having orchestrated the exhaustion, they send a message encouraging recovery. It costs nothing. It requires no systemic change. It creates the appearance of caring without the substance of action. Worse, it shifts responsibility to the individual. If you come back from the holiday still tired, still depleted, still running on empty—well, that’s on you. You didn’t rest properly. You didn’t manage your energy effectively. The system is fine; you just failed to maintain yourself adequately.

This is accountability theater. It’s wellness washing. And it lets leaders feel good about themselves while changing absolutely nothing about the conditions that deplete their people.

Transactional Leadership in Disguise

For those of us who study leadership, the “recharge” message is revealing in another way: it exposes the transactional nature of what often poses as transformational leadership. Transactional leadership operates on exchange. I give you compensation; you give me labor. I give you time off; you give me renewed productivity. Everything is a transaction, a quid pro quo, a deal.

Transformational leadership operates differently. It’s concerned with meaning, purpose, growth, and the full development of human potential. Transformational leaders don’t manage energy cycles—they create environments where people find purpose in the work itself.

A transformational leader asks different questions:

Are people leaving work each day with something left for their families? Not “are they resting enough on weekends,” but are we structuring work so that depletion doesn’t happen in the first place?

Does the work itself provide meaning, mastery, and moments of flow? Not “are benefits competitive,” but does showing up here connect to something people actually care about?

Are we creating conditions where people can be whole humans during work, not just after it? Not “do we have a wellness program,” but does our culture allow people to be fully themselves—with energy, creativity, and humanity intact—while they’re here?

The “recharge” message never asks these questions. It accepts depletion as the baseline and manages around it. That’s not transformation. That’s maintenance of a broken system.

What Honest Leadership Would Sound Like

Imagine if leaders said this instead:

“I hope you spend your holiday however brings you the most joy, whether that’s adventure or rest, solitude or connection, productivity or absolute stillness. That’s what it’s for. It’s yours. Be with the people you love. Do what makes you feel alive. And when you come back, we’ll continue trying to build a place worth showing up to.”

That would be honest. That would acknowledge that the holiday belongs to the person, not to the organization’s productivity pipeline. That would recognize employees as ends in themselves, not means to quarterly targets. It would also create an uncomfortable obligation: if you’re not going to rely on holidays to fix your depletion problem, you have to actually address the depletion problem. You have to design work differently. You have to question the meetings, the deadlines, the always-on expectations, the culture of performative busyness.

The “recharge” message lets leaders avoid that work. No wonder it’s so popular.

A Challenge for Leaders

If you’re a leader reading this, I want to offer you a challenge.

Next holiday season, don’t send the “recharge” email. Don’t tell people to rest so they can be productive when they are back. Don’t instrumentalize their time off. Instead, ask yourself: Why do my people need recovery in the first place? What have I built, or allowed to persist, that depletes them so thoroughly that they need weeks away just to feel human again?

And then do something about it. Not a wellness webinar. Not a meditation app subscription. Something structural. Something real.

Because the answer to exhausted employees isn’t better vacations.

It’s work worth showing up for.