The moral responsibility of people managers

When I was still in the Armed Forces, at the very start of my HR career, yet in a role with far more responsibility than my callow youth had prepared me for, I was wont to say, on a regular basis, "at the end of the day, we have to remember that we are just another employer".

The motto of the Royal Military Academy is "Serve to Lead", but I observed first-hand the pressure that this expectation - that commissioned officers had a moral responsibility for their subordinates - placed upon leaders, young and old. Now, don't get me wrong. There were elements of this culture that were truly excellent. The way a young, pregnant recruit was supported by the Army was terrific. The commitment to helping a drug addict into recovery, even as she was eased back onto civvie street, went far beyond the minimum. The readiness of not only individuals but the whole system to throw itself behind its people was often inspiring.

But it had a darker side. Deepcut Garrison showed this in the failed investigations into suspicious apparent self-inflicted deaths. And now we're seeing it again in the new investigations into the Bloody Sunday killings.

In a less sinister, but equally tragic, fashion I saw the toll that a personal sense of responsibility took on officers whose soldiers were killed, wounded or mentally scarred through combat. I lost one close friend because he insisted on accompanying a wounded subordinate to hospital, only for the ambulance to be caught in the blast of a roadside IED. But I also saw brilliant and committed men and women crack under the pressure and suffer their own permanent mental scars because they utterly believed in their moral responsibility. One colleague took his own life under the pressure.

And these, I would like to remind you, were some of the most talented, best-trained and mentally-robust leaders our nation has produced.

Now your workforce managers may not have to face the literal slings and arrows of combat, but they are expected to operate in an environment in which the wounds and risks are every bit as real and a thousand times harder to spot. It's one thing to give it everything you've got when you turn up for work, but it's quite another to willingly throw yourself into trying to manage situations that are, frankly, nothing to do with your job and which will only end up waking you at 3am in a cold sweat.

In guess what I'm saying is that it is good, ethical, even noble to give a monkey's about your staff. But it is also important to know where the line is - and it's a line that might be different for every manager. You owe it to yourself to know the point at which your commitment needs to stop, not only for good, professional reasons but for your own mental health.

Twenty years down the line, it's still just a job. We are still just an employer.