In the US with its dominant at-will, employer-favored asymmetric, antagonistic worker-business employment policy model, unless the employee is in a hot du jour skill (and trust me, this current local maxima programmers like us are enjoying will come crashing to an abrupt, sobering end) where they can with 100% certainty quit one day and pick up a new job in a couple weeks, or they observe from history they report to a leadership structure like yours that they can trust coming forward, the incentives are all aligned against sharing such productivity gains with the employer. At least until the employee has another job lined up.
This is because the leadership incentives are massively tilted in favor of taking big, quick wins off the table as soon as they appear, and the details are not transmitted up the reporting chain. Eliminating a position and maintaining its work output through automation is bonused far more than "just" the automation by itself. The numbers of the elimination show up on the books, but the skills, organizational knowledge, innovation, organizing, perseverance, and other attributes it took to bring the automation across the finish line do not show up as numbers or even slide decks with conceptual angles.
When faced with showing a 2X or greater cost savings plus a productivity boost, or a 0.10-1.00X valued productivity boost and re-positioning the employee to another role with a spin-up cost, the effect on bonuses is noticeable. When the leadership's tenure themselves is uncertain, is it any wonder why incentive choices fall where they do?
I come at this from the consulting side, and I see far more short-sighted incentivized leadership than leadership like you in my client accounts because of the prevailing incentive structures in my clients. This is interesting to me because one of my theses I'm observing for is going forward, the high-margin companies are going to be the ones that buck this trend. I suspect this is because those companies are tapping into what I believe is a growing successfully adaptive response to the technologically-driven complexity increasingly associated with high margins: you need high capital, low time preference, and high+deep trust. It used to be with sufficient capital and moderate trust at just leadership levels, you could power through nearly any business, but I'm seeing signs this model is increasingly mal-adaptive to economic structures with strong network effects affinities.
This is because the leadership incentives are massively tilted in favor of taking big, quick wins off the table as soon as they appear, and the details are not transmitted up the reporting chain. Eliminating a position and maintaining its work output through automation is bonused far more than "just" the automation by itself. The numbers of the elimination show up on the books, but the skills, organizational knowledge, innovation, organizing, perseverance, and other attributes it took to bring the automation across the finish line do not show up as numbers or even slide decks with conceptual angles.
When faced with showing a 2X or greater cost savings plus a productivity boost, or a 0.10-1.00X valued productivity boost and re-positioning the employee to another role with a spin-up cost, the effect on bonuses is noticeable. When the leadership's tenure themselves is uncertain, is it any wonder why incentive choices fall where they do?
I come at this from the consulting side, and I see far more short-sighted incentivized leadership than leadership like you in my client accounts because of the prevailing incentive structures in my clients. This is interesting to me because one of my theses I'm observing for is going forward, the high-margin companies are going to be the ones that buck this trend. I suspect this is because those companies are tapping into what I believe is a growing successfully adaptive response to the technologically-driven complexity increasingly associated with high margins: you need high capital, low time preference, and high+deep trust. It used to be with sufficient capital and moderate trust at just leadership levels, you could power through nearly any business, but I'm seeing signs this model is increasingly mal-adaptive to economic structures with strong network effects affinities.