What Happens When Productivity Is Being Pulled by Love?
We treat productivity like it’s always a good thing. More is better. Faster is better. Efficient is better. But as I started looking at productivity through the lens of love and fear, a question kept surfacing: what’s underneath the output?
Fear-based productivity is everywhere. It’s the hustle that comes from proving your worth. The 60-hour weeks driven by the terror of falling behind. The systems designed to extract more, faster, from people who are already running on empty. It works, technically. But the cost is real.
I got curious about what happens when productivity runs on something else entirely.
That curiosity led me to Kevin Hancock. He’s the CEO of Hancock Lumber, one of the oldest family-owned businesses in Maine. Kevin lost much of his speaking voice to a condition called spasmodic dysphonia. Every word became effort. So he stopped talking as much and started listening.
He spent time at Pine Ridge Reservation with the Lakota people. He noticed how often voices get taken, sometimes by force, sometimes by systems nobody questions anymore. That experience changed how he led. He started spreading power across the company. He gave decisions to the people closest to the work.
What happened next is the part I keep coming back to. Hancock Lumber didn’t use the gains to push harder. They reduced the average work week from 48 to 41 hours while raising take-home pay. Fewer errors. Better service. People had energy left over for their actual lives.
Love-based productivity doesn’t look like slowing down. It looks like redirecting what the work is for.
Read the full piece on Substack
Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org
