HR Leaders Protect Against Burnout by Setting Boundaries That Make Compassion Sustainable
The stuff they teach you in school is maybe 20% of the job. The other 80% is people, and people are messy. They're going through things you can't put in a policy manual.
Russ Irby
HR Director
Fort Hays State University
No HR certification prepares you for a violent confrontation between two employees or for the moment you have to tell a worker they’re losing their healthcare. These are the parts of the job that arrive without warning and stay with you for years, and they reveal what HR is actually made of underneath the policies and the paperwork. It’s a role about people at their most vulnerable, carried by someone who has to stay steady when everyone else around them can’t. The best HR leaders are the ones who can be present for a person on the worst day of their life and still do the job that has to be done.
Russ Irby isn’t your typical HR professional. He’s the HR Director at Fort Hays State University, a position he arrived at via a direct route through human crisis. Before HR, he spent years as a police officer and later as a drug and alcohol counselor, two professions built entirely around meeting people in moments of fear, loss, and breakdown. That background shapes an approach that treats the hardest human moments not as interruptions to the work, but as the core of it.
“The stuff they teach you in school is maybe 20% of the job. The other 80% is people, and people are messy. They’re going through things you can’t put in a policy manual,” Irby says. That ratio is where Irby’s experience becomes most valuable, because the 80% is exactly what most HR training leaves untouched.
The moments no textbook covers
Irby doesn’t soften the reality of what the job can demand. He’s been present for events most HR professionals will thankfully never face, and he describes them plainly because pretending they don’t happen leaves people unprepared. “I’ve had a situation where one employee shot another employee. There’s no module for that,” he says. “You just have to show up and be a human being for the people who are left.” Irby believes the instinct in those moments is to reach for procedure because procedure feels safe, but it’s not ultimately what people need first. What they need is someone who can be calm and present while they’re falling apart, and the administrative work can follow once the human moment has been honored.
His years in law enforcement and counseling taught him how to stay regulated when a situation is chaotic, how to be a steady presence for someone in shock, and how to carry the weight of a crisis without being consumed by it, all skills the HR field doesn’t formally teach.
Doing the hard thing with humanity
The hardest category of HR work, in Irby’s view, isn’t the traumatic event that happens to someone else. On the contrary, it’s the painful action HR itself has to take, and he’s candid about how much those decisions can cost the person carrying them out. “I had to let someone go whose son had cancer. That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And you can’t hide behind the policy. You have to look them in the eye and be a human being about it, even while you’re doing something that’s going to hurt them.”
His principle in those moments is that the difficulty of a decision doesn’t excuse the manner in which it is delivered. Treating someone with dignity while delivering news that will upend their life is, from his perspective, the truest test of whether an HR professional understands the job.
That conviction tracks with what the workforce data shows about the cost of getting these human moments wrong. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index (needs link) found that the happiest companies lose 46% fewer employees than their unhappiest counterparts, which for a lower-morale organization can mean roughly 18 additional departures per 100 employees every year. People remember how they were treated when it mattered, and they vote with their tenure. The extreme moments Irby describes sit at one end of a continuum that runs through every hard conversation an organization has with its people.
Boundaries make the work sustainable
Carrying other people’s crises isn’t sustainable without boundaries, and Irby is direct that the counselor’s discipline of protecting your own wellbeing is essential to lasting in HR. The empathy that makes someone good at the job is also what can burn them out if they don’t learn to manage it. “You have to care, but you also have to be able to go home,” he notes. “You can be fully present for someone and still protect yourself enough to do it again tomorrow.”
Striking a balance between being fully present in the moment and being able to release it afterward is what allows an HR professional to keep showing up for people over a long career. Irby frames it not as coldness, but as the opposite: the discipline that makes sustained compassion possible.
That human capacity may matter more now than ever, because the data shows morale itself has become uneven and fragile. Even as overall employee happiness recovered to its highest first-half level since 2023, BambooHR found the gains have not reached everyone, with workers in the 26-to-30 age group sitting a full 17 points below their older colleagues on eNPS. A generation of employees is entering and moving through the workforce less satisfied and less resilient than those around them, which makes the presence of HR leaders who can meet people as people, not cases, more valuable rather than less.
Irby also emphasizes the importance of not carrying it alone. Having people to talk to, whether peers, mentors, or professionals, is what keeps the accumulated weight of the job from becoming unmanageable. The isolation many HR leaders feel from sitting on confidential crises they cannot discuss is itself a risk, and Irby sees building a support system as part of doing the job responsibly.
What HR is really for
The throughline of Irby’s perspective is that HR is fundamentally a human profession wearing an administrative getup. The policies, compliance, and documentation all matter, but they exist in service of the human work and not the other way around. When an HR leader loses sight of that, they become an enforcer of rules. When they hold onto it, they become someone an organization’s people can actually turn to. “At the end of the day, this job is about people. It’s about being there when things fall apart. If you can do that, and do it with some humanity, you’re doing the job right. Everything else is just paperwork.”
His advice for people entering the field is to prepare for the 80% the coursework skips: develop the capacity to sit with someone in pain, build the boundaries that make it survivable, and understand that the moments that will define your career are the ones no manual describes. The technical knowledge is learnable on the job, but the human capacity is what determines whether you belong in it.
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TL;DR
Russ Irby
Fort Hays State University
HR Director
HR Director
No HR certification prepares you for a violent confrontation between two employees or for the moment you have to tell a worker they’re losing their healthcare. These are the parts of the job that arrive without warning and stay with you for years, and they reveal what HR is actually made of underneath the policies and the paperwork. It’s a role about people at their most vulnerable, carried by someone who has to stay steady when everyone else around them can’t. The best HR leaders are the ones who can be present for a person on the worst day of their life and still do the job that has to be done.
Russ Irby isn’t your typical HR professional. He’s the HR Director at Fort Hays State University, a position he arrived at via a direct route through human crisis. Before HR, he spent years as a police officer and later as a drug and alcohol counselor, two professions built entirely around meeting people in moments of fear, loss, and breakdown. That background shapes an approach that treats the hardest human moments not as interruptions to the work, but as the core of it.
“The stuff they teach you in school is maybe 20% of the job. The other 80% is people, and people are messy. They’re going through things you can’t put in a policy manual,” Irby says. That ratio is where Irby’s experience becomes most valuable, because the 80% is exactly what most HR training leaves untouched.
The moments no textbook covers
Irby doesn’t soften the reality of what the job can demand. He’s been present for events most HR professionals will thankfully never face, and he describes them plainly because pretending they don’t happen leaves people unprepared. “I’ve had a situation where one employee shot another employee. There’s no module for that,” he says. “You just have to show up and be a human being for the people who are left.” Irby believes the instinct in those moments is to reach for procedure because procedure feels safe, but it’s not ultimately what people need first. What they need is someone who can be calm and present while they’re falling apart, and the administrative work can follow once the human moment has been honored.
His years in law enforcement and counseling taught him how to stay regulated when a situation is chaotic, how to be a steady presence for someone in shock, and how to carry the weight of a crisis without being consumed by it, all skills the HR field doesn’t formally teach.
Doing the hard thing with humanity
The hardest category of HR work, in Irby’s view, isn’t the traumatic event that happens to someone else. On the contrary, it’s the painful action HR itself has to take, and he’s candid about how much those decisions can cost the person carrying them out. “I had to let someone go whose son had cancer. That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. And you can’t hide behind the policy. You have to look them in the eye and be a human being about it, even while you’re doing something that’s going to hurt them.”
His principle in those moments is that the difficulty of a decision doesn’t excuse the manner in which it is delivered. Treating someone with dignity while delivering news that will upend their life is, from his perspective, the truest test of whether an HR professional understands the job.
That conviction tracks with what the workforce data shows about the cost of getting these human moments wrong. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index (needs link) found that the happiest companies lose 46% fewer employees than their unhappiest counterparts, which for a lower-morale organization can mean roughly 18 additional departures per 100 employees every year. People remember how they were treated when it mattered, and they vote with their tenure. The extreme moments Irby describes sit at one end of a continuum that runs through every hard conversation an organization has with its people.
Boundaries make the work sustainable
Carrying other people’s crises isn’t sustainable without boundaries, and Irby is direct that the counselor’s discipline of protecting your own wellbeing is essential to lasting in HR. The empathy that makes someone good at the job is also what can burn them out if they don’t learn to manage it. “You have to care, but you also have to be able to go home,” he notes. “You can be fully present for someone and still protect yourself enough to do it again tomorrow.”
Striking a balance between being fully present in the moment and being able to release it afterward is what allows an HR professional to keep showing up for people over a long career. Irby frames it not as coldness, but as the opposite: the discipline that makes sustained compassion possible.
That human capacity may matter more now than ever, because the data shows morale itself has become uneven and fragile. Even as overall employee happiness recovered to its highest first-half level since 2023, BambooHR found the gains have not reached everyone, with workers in the 26-to-30 age group sitting a full 17 points below their older colleagues on eNPS. A generation of employees is entering and moving through the workforce less satisfied and less resilient than those around them, which makes the presence of HR leaders who can meet people as people, not cases, more valuable rather than less.
Irby also emphasizes the importance of not carrying it alone. Having people to talk to, whether peers, mentors, or professionals, is what keeps the accumulated weight of the job from becoming unmanageable. The isolation many HR leaders feel from sitting on confidential crises they cannot discuss is itself a risk, and Irby sees building a support system as part of doing the job responsibly.
What HR is really for
The throughline of Irby’s perspective is that HR is fundamentally a human profession wearing an administrative getup. The policies, compliance, and documentation all matter, but they exist in service of the human work and not the other way around. When an HR leader loses sight of that, they become an enforcer of rules. When they hold onto it, they become someone an organization’s people can actually turn to. “At the end of the day, this job is about people. It’s about being there when things fall apart. If you can do that, and do it with some humanity, you’re doing the job right. Everything else is just paperwork.”
His advice for people entering the field is to prepare for the 80% the coursework skips: develop the capacity to sit with someone in pain, build the boundaries that make it survivable, and understand that the moments that will define your career are the ones no manual describes. The technical knowledge is learnable on the job, but the human capacity is what determines whether you belong in it.