Somewhere between the annual engagement survey and the leadership offsite, where the results get presented, something important gets lost. The assumption that engagement drives performance has become so embedded in how organizations think about their people that almost nobody stops to question whether it is actually true.
Jamie Durling questions it. A Chief People Officer (CPO) and transformation partner for global brands, he has watched organizations pour resources into engagement initiatives and walk away with better scores and flat revenue. His conclusion, after years of cross-industry people leadership, is that engagement is not the lever organizations think it is.
“Enabling your employees drives profit,” Durling says. “And it drives engagement.”
The Metric That Is Measuring the Wrong Thing
Engagement scores tell you how people feel about working somewhere. They do not tell you whether those people have what they need to perform. That gap is where most people’s strategies quietly fail. When an organization gets enablement right, engagement is not something that needs to be manufactured. It emerges.
Causality works only in one direction, and most organizations have it backward. They are trying to drive performance by improving sentiment, even though the evidence consistently points the other way. Sentiment improves when performance is possible. And performance is possible when people have what they actually need to do their jobs.
“If employees are properly enabled, they will be engaged,” Durling says. “Not the other way around.”
When Everyone Is Pulling in a Different Direction
Durling has a diagnostic he runs in every organization he enters. He asks people across functions, from marketing and finance to HR and commercial, what they are trying to achieve this year. In most organizations, the answers reveal a collection of function-specific objectives with no shared throughline. Each team is optimizing for its own definition of success, while the organization wonders why collective performance is inconsistent.
“When there is consistency and alignment in terms of what the goals are, that drives enablement because we are giving employees an aligned target to reach,” he says.
The translation differs by function. HR expresses the revenue target differently from the commercial. But the target itself has to be the same. Organizations where that alignment exists move faster, make better decisions, and enable their people more effectively because everyone understands what they are collectively building toward. Organizations without it are asking their people to execute a strategy nobody has fully agreed on. Alignment is what enables performance at a strategic level. But the breakdown becomes even more visible in moments of organizational change.
Where Enablement Breaks First: M&A
Post-merger integration is where enablement often breaks down first, and Durling has seen it happen enough times to know exactly where the failure occurs. Leadership retreats to make decisions without the people who will ultimately execute them, removing the very context required to enable performance. “Making decisions in the ivory tower isolates your ability to make informed decisions,” Durling says. Involving employees from both sides of a merger in the integration process does not slow things down. It produces a more accurate picture of what actually matters, leading to better decisions and, ultimately, to people who are enabled rather than simply managed through change.
That distinction shows up quickly. When people are enabled with context, clarity, and input, productivity follows. When they are not, even the most carefully designed integration plans struggle to translate into results. Any organizational change designed entirely by the people least affected by it carries the same risk. The organizations that navigate change well are the ones that treat the people living through it as a source of intelligence, rather than a target for communication.
The Enablement Priority That Cannot Wait
On the question of enabling the next generation of workers, Durling reframes the premise before answering it. AI training is not a Gen Z initiative. It is the single most important enablement investment every organization needs to be making right now: for every function, every generation, and every role. “AI will not take over jobs,” Durling says, “but AI will take over the jobs of people who do not know how to effectively capitalize on it.”
Organizations that treat AI education as optional are building a workforce that will be structurally disadvantaged in the next few years. The ones that embed AI training into how every function operates are giving their people a productivity multiplier that simultaneously improves output and frees capacity for the higher-value work that actually engages people, in the way engagement surveys have always tried to measure.
What Changes When You Focus on the Right Thing
The reframe Durling is pushing for is not complicated. Stop designing people strategies around how employees feel and start designing them around what employees need.
Get the enablement right, and engagement becomes a consequence rather than a campaign. “Organizations are focused on the wrong thing when driving profit,” Durling says. The right thing has been available the whole time. It just requires asking a different question.
More of Jamie Durling’s work on employee enablement, HR transformation, and profit-through-people strategy is available at jamiedurling.com and on LinkedIn.
