I’ve worked in an org where our CEO had the same sentiment. He preferred the term “work life satisfaction” . Worst thing was, if you really prodded him on it it became clear the definition was basically the same. He just didn’t like the negativity some people had when talking about work life balance.

We all had to quietly nod in agreement in those meetings and then literally everyone else openly talked about work life balance regularly. Being on the hiring team in that company quite, quite often the phrase comes up in interviews. Even our head of HR, thankfully, wouldn’t regurgitate the weird language around that to potential hires asking about work life balance.

Ultimately, executives are just humans. Humans have flaws and sometimes those flaws materialize in pedantic phraseology. People hope their execs are these perfect all-knowing individuals and that’s just never the case. It’s a combination of _some_ amount of competency and a whole lot of luck that put them there in all cases.