Protecting Your People Is Part of the Job
Leadership is often described in terms of strategy, performance and results. Leaders are expected to set direction, make decisions, allocate resources and hold people accountable. These responsibilities matter, but they are not the whole job. Leadership also carries a duty to protect the people who have been entrusted to us.
That responsibility becomes particularly important when employees are exposed to bullying, intimidation, personal abuse or threatening behaviour. The person responsible may be a colleague, customer, client, contractor, elected representative, stakeholder or member of the public. Their role may change the way the situation must be managed, but it does not make unacceptable behaviour acceptable.
Employees should be expected to work professionally with people who are frustrated, disappointed or critical. They should not be expected to tolerate abuse simply because dealing with difficult people is considered part of their job. There is a clear difference between managing a challenging interaction and being treated without basic dignity.
When that line is crossed, leaders have a responsibility to act.
Psychological Safety Requires More Than Encouragement
Many organisations speak about psychological safety. Employees are encouraged to raise concerns, admit mistakes, question decisions and contribute honestly. These are important elements of a healthy workplace, but psychological safety means little if the organisation does not respond when people are subjected to harmful behaviour.
A leader cannot tell employees that their wellbeing matters and then expect them to repeatedly absorb aggression from others. If staff see that abusive behaviour is tolerated whenever the person responsible is influential, persistent or commercially important, they quickly understand the organisation’s real priorities.
Psychological safety is not created through statements, policies or wellbeing programs alone. It is created through the decisions leaders make when protecting an employee becomes difficult or inconvenient.
The true test comes when setting a boundary may upset a customer, damage a relationship or create criticism. At that point, the leader must decide whether the organisation’s commitment to its people is genuine or conditional.
Professionalism Does Not Require Submission
Employees should remain calm, respectful and professional, even when an interaction becomes difficult. However, professionalism should never be confused with submission.
There is a harmful belief in some workplaces that employees who deal with the public must accept whatever behaviour comes their way. Abuse is dismissed as part of customer service, aggression is explained as frustration and intimidation is tolerated because the person involved is considered difficult to manage.
This approach does not resolve the problem. It transfers the cost of another person’s behaviour onto the employee who has the least authority to challenge it.
A professional employee can listen to criticism, explain a decision and work constructively toward a solution. They should not have to endure personal insults, threats, shouting, harassment or sustained intimidation. Requiring them to remain in that situation does not demonstrate resilience. It demonstrates that the organisation has failed to establish reasonable boundaries.
There will be times when a person has a legitimate complaint about an employee or the organisation. That complaint should be heard and assessed fairly. However, the legitimacy of the issue does not justify abusive conduct. A person can be right about the underlying problem and still be wrong in the way they treat others.
Leaders Must Be Willing to Stand Between
Throughout my military and executive career, I have learned that leadership sometimes requires standing between your people and the pressure coming toward them. This does not mean shielding employees from every difficult conversation, criticism or consequence. People must remain accountable for their conduct and performance, and leaders should not defend behaviour that cannot reasonably be defended.
Protection and accountability are not opposites. A strong leader can investigate a complaint objectively while also making it clear that employees will be treated respectfully throughout the process. They can acknowledge that the organisation may have made a mistake without accepting abuse as the price of resolving it.
I have personally experienced interactions in which someone’s frustration crossed into conduct that was neither appropriate nor acceptable. Those moments are confronting, even for an experienced leader. They also reinforce an important principle: if I would not accept that behaviour toward myself, I cannot knowingly expose a member of my team to it.
As a leader, I may choose to carry certain pressures because of the position I hold. I have more authority, experience and organisational protection than many employees. That does not make the behaviour acceptable, but it does mean I am better placed to confront it and establish a boundary.
My staff should not be used as a buffer between the organisation and someone who refuses to behave appropriately. When the risk becomes clear, leadership requires stepping forward rather than asking employees to continue absorbing the impact.
Silence Sends a Message to Everyone
When leaders fail to respond to abusive behaviour, the effect extends beyond the individual incident. The employee involved may feel unsupported, but everyone else is also watching how the organisation responds.
If the leader remains silent, employees may conclude that maintaining an external relationship matters more than their wellbeing. They may become reluctant to report future incidents because they do not believe anything will change. Some will begin avoiding particular customers or stakeholders, while others will quietly absorb the behaviour until the cumulative effect damages their confidence, health or willingness to remain with the organisation.
The person responsible for the behaviour also receives a message. If aggression produces attention, concessions or access to more senior decision-makers, the behaviour is reinforced. They learn that intimidation is an effective way to influence the organisation.
What leaders tolerate becomes part of the operating environment. A failure to set boundaries does not preserve neutrality. It establishes the standard employees and external parties will expect in the future.
Boundaries Protect the Organisation
Setting a boundary is sometimes portrayed as confrontational. In reality, clear boundaries often protect relationships by making the terms of future engagement explicit.
A leader may require all communication to be directed through a designated senior officer. They may end a meeting or telephone call when abusive behaviour begins. They may insist that future discussions occur in writing, with witnesses present or through formal representatives. In serious cases, they may need to involve human resources, security, legal advisers or law enforcement.
These actions should be proportionate to the behaviour and the level of risk. The purpose is not to punish criticism or prevent legitimate scrutiny. It is to create a safe and professional framework within which the underlying issue can be addressed.
Leaders should also ensure that boundaries are communicated calmly and clearly. Anger may be understandable, particularly when someone has mistreated a member of the team, but the organisational response must remain measured. A firm response is often more powerful when it is factual, controlled and leaves no room for misunderstanding.
The message should be straightforward: we remain willing to discuss the issue, but we will not permit our people to be abused while doing so.
Protecting People Does Not Mean Avoiding Accountability
There is a risk that the language of protection can be misused to shield employees from legitimate complaints or difficult performance conversations. Leaders must guard against this.
If an employee has acted improperly, provided poor service or contributed to a conflict, the matter should be addressed. The employee should receive fair feedback, and the organisation should take responsibility where responsibility is due.
However, an investigation into an employee’s conduct and the management of abusive behaviour are separate issues. One does not cancel the other. An employee can be held accountable through a fair internal process while still being protected from intimidation or personal attack.
Good leadership requires the ability to hold both positions at once. We will examine our own conduct honestly, and we will insist that anyone engaging with our people does so respectfully.
This balanced approach strengthens rather than weakens accountability. Employees are more likely to acknowledge mistakes and participate openly in a review when they trust that their leader will treat them fairly and will not abandon them to external pressure.
Check What Your Systems Are Asking People to Endure
Leaders may not always know the extent of the behaviour their employees are managing. Frontline staff often deal with aggression, disrespect and intimidation without reporting every incident. They may assume it is part of the job, fear being regarded as unable to cope or believe that senior leaders will not act.
This makes it important for leaders to ask directly about the pressures employees are facing. Complaint data, incident reports and formal grievances provide some information, but they rarely tell the whole story. Regular conversations with customer service teams, operational staff and managers can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
Leaders should consider whether employees know when they can end an interaction, who they can call for support and how an incident should be recorded. They should also examine whether organisational practices unintentionally reward abusive behaviour by providing faster service, special access or more favourable outcomes to those who behave most aggressively.
If the only way to receive senior attention is to intimidate a frontline employee, the organisation has created a dangerous incentive. Systems should make it easy to raise a legitimate concern without making aggression an effective escalation strategy.
Courage Is Sometimes a Boundary
Leadership courage is often associated with major decisions, public crises or organisational change. It can also be found in the quieter act of drawing a line and refusing to allow someone to mistreat your people.
That boundary may carry consequences. An influential stakeholder may complain, a customer may threaten to take their business elsewhere or the leader may be accused of being defensive. These risks must be considered, but they cannot become a reason to accept conduct that damages the team.
Employees will remember whether their leader stood beside them when doing so was uncomfortable. That memory shapes trust more deeply than a policy statement or a speech about organisational values.
People do not expect their leaders to prevent every difficult interaction. They do expect them to respond when the limits of acceptable behaviour have clearly been crossed.
Protection Is a Leadership Duty
Leaders have a duty to create an environment in which people can perform their work without being subjected to bullying, intimidation or abuse. That duty cannot be delegated entirely to a policy, a human resources team or the employee experiencing the behaviour.
It requires leaders to pay attention, investigate concerns, establish boundaries and take responsibility for the organisational response. It also requires them to distinguish between legitimate criticism and unacceptable conduct, ensuring that accountability remains fair while dignity is protected.
Your people will face pressure. They will occasionally deal with angry, demanding and unreasonable individuals. They will need professionalism, resilience and sound judgement to manage those situations well.
What they should not need is the ability to endure unlimited abuse while their leaders remain safely removed from it.
Leadership is not only about directing people toward an outcome. It is also about accepting responsibility for the conditions in which they are expected to achieve it.
When someone crosses the line, your team should know that you will not leave them standing there alone.
Protecting your people is not an optional act of kindness. It is part of the job.
