What Happens When Productivity Is Being Pulled by Love?

I’ve been thinking about productivity recently.
Not just what it is. What’s underneath it.

We often treat productivity, especially in a business context, as only positive. More is better. Faster is better. Efficient is better. But as I expand my thinking on productivity and view it through the lens of love and fear, I keep coming back to a couple questions. What’s underneath the productivity? Is it being pulled by love or pushed by fear?

Fear-based productivity is everywhere. It shows up in hustle. In stress. In the pressure to prove your worth or protect your place. It uses productivity to extract more money, more output, more speed. More doing, less being.

I’m more interested in what happens when productivity is being pulled by love.

Kevin Hancock’s Voice and His Shift

That’s why Kevin Hancock’s book Not For Sale stayed with me. He’s the CEO of Hancock Lumber, one of the oldest family-owned businesses in Maine and in the entire country. His story is not a business case study. It’s a personal reflection. He lost much of his speaking voice to a condition called spasmodic dysphonia. Every word became effort.

So, he spoke less. And listened more.

He spent time at Pine Ridge Reservation. He sat with Lakota people. He noticed how often people have their voices taken from them. Sometimes by force. Sometimes by systems. Sometimes by patterns they’ve stopped questioning.

That experience changed him and how he led.

Kevin began spreading leadership across the company. He gave more power to the people closest to the work. He listened without rushing. He let others shape the way forward. The company became more productive, not because people were scared, but because they were trusted.

Better, Not Just More

And here’s what I really love. They didn’t use that productivity to do more. They used it to do better. Not just better for the owner’s wallets. Better for their employees and customers.

Hancock Lumber reduced the average work week from 48 to 41 hours all while raising take-home pay. Managers capped their own hours at 50. People had more energy for their lives outside of work.

At the same time, they got more accurate. Fewer delivery errors. Fewer re-dos. Customers experienced better service, not worse. Trusting people more and simplifying systems improved the whole operation.

For me, that’s what it looks like when productivity is being pulled by love.

Rethinking the System Itself

That story has me rethinking what productivity is even for. We often assume that capitalism demands extraction. That it rewards only speed and scale. But what if that’s not the root issue? What if it’s not the system itself, but the energy behind how we practice it?

That’s the question I keep circling.

Are capitalism and productivity inherently good or bad? Or are they mirrors, reflecting the people and mindsets behind them? Can they be shaped by love just as easily as they can be twisted by fear?

What Are We Really Practicing

On one hand, capitalism as practiced today often runs on fear. Fear of scarcity. Fear of failure. Fear of falling behind. Those fears drive short-term thinking, endless growth, and the quiet assumption that the people doing the work are costs to be minimized rather than humans to be cared for.

But then you look at something like Hancock Lumber. Or the B Corp movement. Or the growing number of purpose-driven companies that are using business to heal, not just extract. These are examples that suggest another path. They show that it’s possible to use the tools of capitalism in a different way. They show what happens when decisions are pulled by love.

I’m not claiming to know the answer. I don’t know whether capitalism is inherently fear-based. I don’t know if it can be fully remade. But I do know it’s powerful. And that power can be aimed in more than one direction.

Productivity Is a Multiplier

The same is true of productivity. It’s just a force. A multiplier. The question is, what are we multiplying? And who benefits from the gains?

Most weeks, I find myself asking those questions in small, ordinary moments. A scheduling decision. A budget discussion. A shortcut that might save time but cost trust. These are the moments where I get to choose what energy I’m bringing into the system.

I’m not trying to be perfect. But I do want to stay present. To notice what’s underneath my choices. To question what I’ve been taught to accept as normal.

A Few Questions I’m Still Sitting With

If anything in this stirred something in you, I’d love to hear it.

• Who taught you what it means to be “productive,” and do you still agree?

• When have you felt most productive and most whole at the same time?

• If productivity were a mirror, what would it be reflecting back to you?

I’m still sorting through all of this. Maybe you are too. That’s part of the adventure.