The Three Productivity Gaps Every CEO Must Address
Every organization carries hidden costs that never appear on a balance sheet: disengagement, muted creativity, untapped passion, and purpose left unrealized. The Three Domains of Freedom Workshop reveals how these invisible losses stem from three critical productivity gaps—in listening, personal flourishing, and mission-driven purpose. When left unaddressed, they quietly erode performance, trust, and innovation. When closed, they unlock extraordinary levels of engagement, resilience, and impact—transforming ordinary workplaces into thriving, high-performing cultures.
“Inspired workers are 125% more productive than those who are not”
The Personal Aspiration Productivity Gap:
Most employees don’t dare share with their CEO who they really want to be, for fear it won’t match company objectives, for fear they won’t get the promotion, position or salary they would like. This gap between employees and C-suite executives means that employees’ energy is muted, abstracted, they feel unrecognized and uninspired in their place of work, leading to lower workforce engagement, a lack of authenticity throughout the company, distractions, mental health issues, quiet quitting, and eventually leaving the company. Trainings that focus on improving employee skills, creating ‘fun’ spaces at work, or defining company purpose are all missing the point: That an employee’s personal authenticity and their passion for their own aspirations are not viewed as assets creates problems for the employee and inefficiencies for the company.
Imagine instead a company where every employee feels that the company, first and foremost, wants them to flourish in their lives, and most of all in what they care about a their heart’s core, their personal aspirations. Here the company understands that a flourishing person is automatically a flourishing employee.
As a CEO, above everything, one should want employees that are flourishing.
Employee passion for their company’s aspirations often ranges from 20-70%.
However, human beings are inspired by their personal dreams of freedom, not so much by their boss’s or their company’s dreams of freedom. Bain and Company found that an inspired worker is 125% more productive than a satisfied worker.
How do we capture that 125% productivity boost? Easy. We break the barrier between CEO and employees by celebrating the employee’s personal aspirations through the life planning technology that George Kinder brought 25 years ago to the financial advice world in 30 cultures. Make it corporate culture to put their people first, by celebrating and supporting the flourishing of their personal aspirations.
Celebrate each employee first of all for who they really are, what they most aspire to in life, rather than for their role in the company. See employees as differentiated human beings. If they are flourishing in their lives, they will flourish in their work. And when employees feel free to pursue their greatest aspirations, the company invested in them will be positioned to thrive because each employee is 125% more productive doing the work of more than two marginally satisfied employees.
It is humans’ basic natures to flourish as the people we most truly want to be. CEOs, drop the fear and unleash that energy, that engagement, that productivity across your enterprise!
The Mission-Driven Purpose Productivity Gap:
Purpose-driven businesses grow three times faster than their peers. Purpose aligns people, strategy, and culture around something that truly matters. When employees believe in why they work, they bring greater energy, creativity, and commitment—driving higher productivity and lower turnover. Customers, in turn, reward authentic, values-led companies with deeper loyalty and trust. Purpose also sharpens decision-making and fuels innovation, giving leaders a clear compass in times of change. The result is a powerful cycle of engagement, resilience, and differentiation that consistently translates into stronger, more sustainable growth.
“Employees with a strong sense of purpose at work are 5.6 times as likely to be engaged in their jobs as those with a low sense of purpose. They are also much less likely to feel burned out or be watching for or actively seeking a new job. These outcomes reflect better individual experiences at work and are associated with improved organizational outcomes, including productivity and profitability,” reports a Gallup study. “Only 18% describe their current job as one that has a purpose they personally believe in.”
Deloitte finds that 89% Gen Z and 92% Millennials say a sense of purpose is important to their job satisfaction.
Whatever your company mission and business structure, The Moules will inspire your workforce with your defined purposes, and then carry that inspiration much further by engaging employees to internalize their own version of fiduciary, creating for all, and particularly for the leadership, the inspiration of an organization-wide Fiduciary In All Things (FIAT) mindset. The excitement and freedom will be palpable, the trustworthiness evident for all to see.
The Listening Productivity Gap:
Our authenticity moves at the pace at which we listen: 100 million times as fast as thought. It contains far more data, more information, more knowledge and more wisdom than thought.
If your primary emphasis is for your employees to be quick in thought, when listening is so much faster, you will be slowing workforce engagement, productivity and efficiency down.
Enhancing our listening makes everyone smarter as well as emotionally intelligent, collaborative and connected, creative and more capable of thinking outside the box.
Moreover, our authenticity moves at exactly the same pace as everyone we connect with. People gravitate toward those with the greatest authenticity who tend to be the most grounded, the best listeners, the most calm in a crisis, and the most capable of thinking creatively outside the box.
The question is, how authentic are we? How connected are we to our own authenticity.
To build sustainable organizations, the ground on which they are built is the listening power of their employees.
Listening first to ourselves, then listening to others within our community, and then listening to the world around us.
Listening is at the heart of fiduciary. Listening skills can be taught. Among all the ways we can learn to listen, the one that covers the most territory in the briefest amount of time, is most subtle and goes the deepest is mindfulness.
Mindfulness as a skill is the practice toward the mastery of the present moment, which is the pace of nature, listening and authenticity. What greater mastery could you want?
The Three Domains Workshop succeeds by addressing these three huge productivity gaps. Addressing them strengthens the workforce and diminishes virtually every pain point of a business.
Are you ready to close these productivity gaps?