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The Manager Layer

Writer: Sarah Fearon
Sarah Fearon
Aug 31
6 min read

Burnout and conflict in professional-services firms as a structural problem

Sarah Fearon | Working paper, August 2026

Sarah Fearon is a former barrister. She practised family law in England and Wales for 25 years, was ranked as a Leading Junior in The Legal 500 from 2020 to 2026, co-founded Crown Chambers, and served as an elected member of the Bar Council of England and Wales. She is the founder of Fearon Advisory and writes on the structure of professional practice.

The argument in one line

Manager burnout is not a wellness problem. It is a structural problem: a load-bearing layer absorbing the organisation's conflict with no structure for the weight, treated with tools designed for individuals.

The mechanism

An arch stands because of one stone. The keystone looks like every other stone in the structure. It carries the compression of both sides at once. It gets no attention while it holds, and if it cracks, the arch does not sag. It falls.

The managers of an organisation are that stone. Weight comes down from above: targets, restructures, decisions still taking shape. Weight comes up from below: teams bring their conflict, their performance and their anxiety to the one person responsible for holding all three. Then comes a third load, the one this paper is about. Managers are required to perform composure. A manager who shows the strain is read as a manager who cannot cope, so the strain is carried silently.

Three loads: down, up, in. Managers can carry enormous volume downwards and upwards; that is the job, and experienced managers are built for it. The fracture risk concentrates in the inward load: composure held indefinitely, with no formal occasion on which the weight can be put down.

The third load has a research literature

The inward load has a name in occupational psychology, and it has had one for more than forty years. Since Arlie Hochschild's The Managed Heart (1983), the display of composure one does not feel, while suppressing what one does feel, has been studied as surface acting. The largest synthesis of that literature, Hülsheger and Schewe's 2011 meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, found surface acting correlated at .439 with emotional exhaustion and .481 with depersonalisation. Its authors concluded that these relationships, together with those of the closely related construct of emotion-rule dissonance, “exceed effect sizes of other potential antecedents of burnout to a considerable extent”. Surface acting is one of the strongest known correlates of burnout. The primary studies are largely cross-sectional, so the claim is association rather than prediction, and it is striking enough as an association.

What managers are performing composure about, much of the time, is other people's conflict. Acas's analysis of workplace conflict, using 2018/19 data, estimated that 9.7 million employees experienced conflict at work in a year and put the cost to UK employers at £28.5 billion annually. Conflict research counts the disputes. Burnout research counts the exhaustion. The absorption sits between the two literatures, largely unmeasured: the daily, unrecorded work of taking in conflict from two directions while displaying none of it.

The layer is failing measurably

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace reported manager engagement falling to 22% worldwide in 2025, from 27%. The Chartered Management Institute reported in 2023 that 82% of managers who enter management positions have had no formal management and leadership training. In Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive's 2024/25 statistics record 964,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, amounting to 52% of all work-related ill health and 62% of working days lost due to work-related ill health.

The pattern repeats inside the legal profession, the sector this paper knows best. LawCare's Life in the Law 2025 study, drawing 1,541 responses from across the legal sector in the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man, found that of the 49.7% of respondents who manage others, 54.6% had received training, and 31.3% said targets or billable hours were adjusted to account for time spent managing others or undertaking appropriate training. Law firms promote their best practitioners into management of the most conflict-dense caseloads in professional life, and mostly do not adjust the day job to make room for it.

What organisations do instead

The dominant organisational response is individual-level wellbeing provision. The CIPD and Simplyhealth's Health and Wellbeing at Work survey (September 2025) found 64% of organisations “are taking steps to identify and/or reduce stress in the workplace”, while 29% report “training managers to manage staff with mental ill health”.

The evidence for the individual-level approach is weak. William Fleming's 2024 study in the Industrial Relations Journal, a cross-sectional analysis of 46,336 workers across 233 UK organisations covering a range of common individual-level wellbeing practices, found that “across multiple subjective well-being indicators, participants appear no better off”, with volunteering the one practice showing a positive association. Commenting on the study in the press release accompanying it, Fleming pointed the other way from the market: “There's growing consensus that organisations have to change the workplace and not just the worker.”

That is the gap this paper names: the interventions with the weakest evidence are aimed at the one layer that does not generate the load.

The regulatory turn

The structural reading is arriving in regulation, on two separate tracks that should not be conflated.

In financial services, the FCA's non-financial misconduct rules take effect on 1 September 2026, widening the scope of its Conduct Rules so that bullying and harassment fall within them at non-bank SM&CR firms, a change the FCA costed across 37,805 SM&CR firms (PS25/23; instruments FCA 2025/29 and FCA 2025/60). The change is a widening of scope rather than new machinery: what must be disclosed and acted on now travels through regulatory references and conduct processes that already exist.

For every other employer, including law firms, the relevant track is the Health and Safety Executive's treatment of psychosocial risk, benchmarked by ISO 45003, the international standard on psychological health and safety at work, which lists interpersonal conflict among the psychosocial hazards an organisation is expected to manage and treats emotionally demanding work, such as working with aggressive or distressed people, under job demands. On either track, the direction is the same: how an organisation's manager layer carries conflict is becoming an inspectable property of the organisation, rather than a private difficulty of its managers.

Research questions

Three questions follow from this analysis, and they frame the research programme this paper opens.

First, measurement. Conflict absorption by managers is unrecorded almost by definition: it happens informally, before anything becomes a case. What would a defensible measure of the absorption load look like, and what would it show about where organisations actually hold their conflict?

Second, structure. If individual-level interventions show little effect, which structural interventions do: routing conflict off managers, formal release mechanisms, supervision design, span-of-control decisions? The professions offer a natural comparison set, because one of them already runs such structures. Barristers carry other people's highest-stakes conflict for a living, and the Bar has evolved structure for the third load: professional distance as an ethic, the case left at the door as a ritual, supervision and circuit-level support as institutions. Managers are handed a comparable load with none of the comparable structure.

Third, regulation. As conduct and psychosocial-risk regimes reach further into firm culture, what do they imply for how firms must evidence the management of the manager layer itself, and what does a defensible supervision structure look like when a regulator asks to see it?

A note on position

This paper is written from practice. Its author spent 25 years absorbing other people's conflict professionally, held wellbeing roles at chambers, circuit and national level across the Bar of England and Wales, and now advises professional-services firms on the structure of their manager layer. The advisory work functions as a continuing field study, and the claims above are confined to what the cited sources say.

Sources

Fearon Advisory provides structural and organisational advisory services only. It does not provide legal advice or legal services, and nothing on this page constitutes legal advice. For legal advice, consult a practising lawyer.

 
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Fearon is a former family-law barrister and co-founder of Crown Chambers, ranked a Leading Junior in The Legal 500 from 2020 to 2026. She has built and run a professional-services partnership from the inside, not just advised one. At Fearon Advisory she diagnoses where burnout and conflict are structurally produced in the manager layer, and redesigns it so pressure stops collecting on one layer, drawing on the Bar and an MA in International Politics. Structure, not wellness.

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