T HE E NEMY OF E N G AG E M E N T Enablement: Essential for Sustaining Performance Over Time Enablement is key not only to generating high levels of organi- zational performance, but also to sustaining it. An organization may be able to succeed by the force of will of motivated em- ployees in the short term, but over the long haul adequate sup- port is necessary to avoid burnout. Consider a case-study example: For a major UK retailer, we linked employee engage- ment and employee enablement across approximately five hun- dred stores with store-level measures of customer satisfaction and fiscal year revenue against target, collected at two different points in time. Employee engagement and employee enablement were both associated with more favorable customer and finan- cial outcomes. But after a six-month lag, enablement was a much