Have we changed the job without changing the training?
There is a particular route into management that will be familiar to almost every professional organisation.
Someone is very good at what they do.
They are technically strong, dependable, commercially valuable and respected by colleagues. They understand the work, know the clients and get results.
So we give them people to manage.
It happens in financial services, law firms, professional services and large corporate organisations all the time. A good lawyer becomes responsible for junior lawyers. A high-performing financial professional takes responsibility for a team. A technical specialist becomes a line manager.
The assumption, often unspoken, is that the ability to do the job well will somehow translate into the ability to manage the people doing it.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it really doesn't.
What makes this more difficult is that the people-management part of the job has become considerably more complicated.
Managers still need to deal with performance, workload, deadlines, absence, conduct and development. But alongside those responsibilities, they may now find themselves responding to an employee who is experiencing significant distress, disclosing domestic abuse, struggling with substance use, asking for an adjustment following an ADHD or autism diagnosis, showing signs of burnout, behaving completely out of character or saying that they simply cannot cope anymore.
In a law firm, that conversation may be happening while a major case is running and client deadlines remain immovable.
In financial services, it may sit alongside regulatory responsibilities, conduct expectations and roles in which impaired judgement has consequences well beyond the individual employee.
In large corporate environments, a manager may be balancing the needs of teams spread across different locations, cultures and working patterns while trying to make sense of increasingly complex expectations around inclusion, wellbeing and performance.
The question is not whether managers should solve these problems.
They shouldn't.
The more useful question is whether we have properly prepared them to respond when these problems arrive at work.
Increasingly, I am not convinced that we have.
The figures suggest this is no longer a peripheral issue
In Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive estimates that 964,000 workers experienced work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. Stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 22.1 million lost working days.
Those numbers matter, but the organisational cost is wider than sickness absence.
Distress shows up in judgement, behaviour, relationships, concentration, decision-making and performance long before somebody necessarily becomes absent from work.
That becomes particularly significant in sectors where people themselves are the principal asset.
A legal practice cannot separate the wellbeing and functioning of its lawyers from client service. A financial institution cannot completely separate workforce culture from conduct and risk. A professional services business cannot talk seriously about retention while ignoring the management conditions experienced by the people it hopes to retain.
Research within the legal profession makes the point particularly starkly.
LawCare's Life in the Law 2025 work recommends that legal organisations actively manage workload and, significantly, prioritise and value managing people. It argues that senior lawyers should not simply be assumed to be good managers because they have reached seniority, and that people managers require proper time, targeted training and continuing support.
That is an important observation.
Professional expertise and people-management expertise are different things.
We have historically been much better at developing the former.
Knowing the policy is not the same as being able to have the conversation
Most large organisations already have policies.
There may be an employee assistance programme, occupational health, wellbeing resources, reasonable-adjustment procedures, conduct policies, domestic abuse guidance and routes into HR.
These things matter.
But they tend to come into play after someone has recognised that something is happening.
That first moment is much less procedural.
- A manager notices that a previously excellent employee is making mistakes.
- Someone who was always engaged has become withdrawn.
- A colleague has begun missing meetings or arriving late.
- Someone has become unusually defensive.
- A junior employee appears overwhelmed and frightened of making even minor mistakes.
- A member of the team discloses that something serious is happening at home.
- The manager does not know the explanation.
Nor should they.
There may be a mental health issue. There may be domestic abuse. There may be a physical health condition, caring responsibilities, financial difficulties, neurodivergence or substance use. There may be an organisational problem. There may simply be a straightforward performance issue.
Managers are not there to diagnose what is presenting.
But neither should their only available response be to begin a process.
There is an important professional space between diagnosis and procedure.
It begins with noticing that something has changed and being able to ask about it without making assumptions.
That may sound easy until the employee answers.
Managers often tell us, in different ways, that this is the point at which confidence disappears.
- What if somebody tells me they are suicidal?
- What if they disclose domestic abuse and ask me not to tell anyone?
- What if I suspect substance use?
- What am I allowed to ask about ADHD?
- What if an adjustment affects the rest of the team?
- What if I think someone's behaviour is unacceptable but I also know they are experiencing significant distress?
- What if I make it worse?
These are not specialist clinical questions. They are increasingly ordinary management questions arising inside modern workplaces.
Yet many managers have received very little preparation for them.
Neurodiversity is a useful test of how large the gap has become
Neurodiversity gives us a particularly clear example.
In March 2026, Acas reported that only 32% of workers surveyed believed their employer was effective at training managers to identify and make reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent colleagues. Thirty-five per cent believed their employer was ineffective, while another 32% did not know.
That is a considerable gap between the visibility of neurodiversity as a workplace issue and confidence that managers know what to do about it.
The difficulty is rarely solved by giving managers more diagnostic information.
A manager does not need to know everything about ADHD or autism. They need to understand that people with the same diagnosis may experience work completely differently, and that useful support is generally built through conversation rather than assumption.
Acas advises employers to consider both strengths and areas where support may be needed, and makes clear that an employee may require support even without a formal diagnosis.
For organisations, this is not only an inclusion issue, it can become a performance, retention and legal issue.
It is entirely possible for an organisation to have an excellent neurodiversity policy while the employee's actual experience depends upon whether their individual manager understands how to respond.
The same applies to mental health, domestic abuse and many other complex workforce issues.
Policies create consistency and protection. managers create the lived experience.
The legal and financial sectors have particular reasons to pay attention
There is an additional layer for highly regulated and high-pressure professional environments. The culture of financial services is already under increasing scrutiny in relation to behaviour and conduct.
From 1 September 2026, the FCA's rules on serious non-financial misconduct extend across a much wider range of regulated firms. Its final guidance covers bullying, harassment and violence, and explicitly recognises that firms and managers will need to exercise judgement when determining how concerns should be handled. This is significant.
It reinforces something that organisations sometimes overlook when they separate “people issues” from the serious business of risk and regulation.
- How managers respond to behaviour matters.
- What they notice matters.
- What they tolerate matters.
- Whether employees feel able to raise concerns matters.
And crucially, whether managers can distinguish a difficult employee situation from one requiring formal escalation matters. The same principle applies in law.
The American Bar Association has continued to highlight the impact of the working environment on lawyers' mental health. In August 2026, research involving 2,915 lawyers found persistent workplace pressures and systemic barriers affecting mental wellbeing, with the report calling for leadership accountability and organisational rather than purely individual responses.
Recent ABA commentary has also made a direct business case for law firms to treat mental wellbeing as an organisational issue, linking the functioning of partners and senior attorneys as people managers with engagement, retention and long-term firm stability.
one of this means that professional services firms should become therapeutic environments, as that would be both unrealistic and undesirable.
It means recognising that organisations whose business depends heavily upon human judgement cannot treat the management of human beings as a secondary skill.
Pressure is not the enemy
There is a tendency for conversations about workplace wellbeing to become polarised.
- One side can sound as though any pressure is damaging.
- The other treats pressure, exhaustion and extreme hours as evidence of commitment.
- either is particularly useful.
- Professional work can be demanding.
Legal deadlines are real. Financial markets do not reorganise themselves around an individual's stress level. Clients have expectations. Organisations need people to perform and managers sometimes need to say that performance is not good enough. The issue is not whether work should ever feel difficult, but whether managers can recognise the difference between healthy challenge and a situation that is becoming unsustainable.
That distinction has become more important as organisations deal with rapid technological and structural change.
Deloitte's 2026 UK Human Capital Trends research found that 76% of UK respondents said their wellbeing had suffered because they were tired from too much change at work. Fifty-seven per cent reported increased workloads as a result of organisational change, while just 18% believed their organisations managed change effectively.
For law, finance and professional services, the implications of AI make this particularly interesting.
Automation may take over more technical work, but that does not reduce the importance of managers. In some respects it increases it. Recent reporting on major UK professional-services firms has highlighted precisely this issue, with organisations placing renewed emphasis on human capabilities such as leadership, empathy, judgement and communication as AI takes on more technical tasks. The human part of management is not disappearing, but is becoming more valuable.
This is not only a UK issue
Although much of the evidence above comes from the UK, the broader pattern is visible elsewhere.
In the United States, SHRM's 2026 Mental Health Snapshot found rising levels of stress and anxiety among employees and, notably, declining confidence among HR professionals about their preparedness to respond to workplace mental-health challenges.
US neurodiversity research shows something similar. Understood.org's 2026 survey found that one in three adults had asked an employer for an accommodation, while 85% believed employers needed better education about accommodations for neurodivergent employees. Among neurodivergent employees, 72% reported feeling pressure to mask at work.
In the UAE, the terminology and employment context are different, but the question of management capability is equally relevant.
The UAE has a clear policy commitment to inclusion and the employment of People of Determination, including support for employment across public and private sectors.
More recent research adds an interesting organisational dimension. A 2026 study of 427 neurodivergent employees working across finance, government, technology and education in the UAE found that perceived exclusion by leaders was associated with stigma, psychological unsafety, disengagement and workplace resistance. https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S2040714926000148
The employment systems and legal responsibilities in London, Dubai and New York are clearly not interchangeable.
But there is a common thread.
The day-to-day experience of an employee is shaped substantially by the person managing them. That gives line managers considerable influence over whether organisational policy becomes meaningful practice.
Managers also need protection from the expectation that they should fix everything
There is another problem here that gets far less attention.
Managers can very quickly become the person everything lands with.
They are expected to notice when someone is struggling, respond well, make adjustments, manage performance, support the team, keep an eye on risk and somehow absorb all of that alongside their actual job. That can become a lot.
If organisations want managers to deal confidently with difficult situations, they also need to be clear about where the manager’s role stops.
Managers need to know when something should move to HR, occupational health, safeguarding, security, a specialist service or a more senior decision-maker. They also need somewhere to ask for advice without feeling they have somehow failed because they do not know the answer.
This matters particularly when someone discloses domestic abuse, significant mental health concerns or problems with substance use. These are exactly the situations where a well-meaning manager can either back away completely or become far too involved but neither helps.
Good support is often much simpler than people think. Listen properly. Work out what is relevant to the workplace. Check whether there is an immediate safety issue. Be clear about what you can and cannot do. Then bring in the right support. Managers do not need to fix people’s lives.
They need to be able to respond well without becoming responsible for everything that happens next.
Understanding context does not remove accountability
One concern often raised about psychologically or trauma-informed approaches is that they will somehow weaken performance management.
- They should do the opposite.
- Understanding context allows organisations to make better decisions.
- It may explain behaviour. It does not automatically excuse it.
- An employee can be going through an extremely difficult period and still behave in a way that needs addressing.
- A neurodivergent employee may require an adjustment and still need to meet the core requirements of their role.
- Someone experiencing significant distress can need support while a performance issue is addressed.
- A manager should be able to hold both realities at once.
- That is particularly important in law and financial services, where standards of behaviour, professional judgement and accountability cannot simply be set aside.
The question is not whether we maintain standards, but whether managers have enough skill to maintain them fairly and intelligently.
The capability gap is organisational, not simply individual
There is not much value in teaching managers to spot problems if, once they do, the organisation gives them nowhere sensible to take them.
That is where this stops being simply a training issue.
You can encourage people to disclose concerns, but if they do not trust what happens next, they will stop disclosing. You can tell managers to make reasonable adjustments, but if every change has to fight its way through layers of approval, very little will improve. You can talk about psychological safety, but if difficult behaviour from a high performer is routinely overlooked, people will notice the contradiction.
The same applies to resilience. If teams are carrying impossible workloads or running short-staffed for months at a time, the answer is unlikely to be another session on coping better.
So the more useful question for organisations is not simply which course managers should attend. It is whether managers are actually equipped for the situations they are now dealing with, and whether the wider organisation backs them up when those situations become complicated.
You can usually see the gaps quite quickly. They show up in the issues managers put off dealing with because they are unsure what to say. In the cases that reach HR only after they have escalated. In reasonable adjustments that drag on far longer than they should. In disclosures that leave managers unsure about confidentiality, risk or what happens next.
They also show up in the things managers themselves say they are worried about getting wrong.
That is a much better place to start when thinking about management development.
The aim is not to create mini-experts in mental health, domestic abuse, neurodiversity, trauma or substance use. It is to make sure managers have enough practical understanding to respond sensibly when these issues begin to affect someone at work.
That means being able to notice a change without deciding what caused it. It means having difficult conversations without turning them into interrogations. It means understanding that distress can affect behaviour and performance, while still being able to deal with behaviour or performance when necessary.
It also means being clear about boundaries. Managers need to know what sits with them, what needs to go elsewhere and when they should ask for help.
Good management is not a choice between empathy and accountability. The two often need to sit alongside each other.
Someone can be going through an extremely difficult period and still need clear expectations. A manager can listen properly without becoming a counsellor. They can show understanding without taking responsibility for fixing another person’s life.
These are not specialist skills for unusually difficult workplaces. They are becoming part of ordinary people management.
And in sectors where judgement, trust, reputation and professional performance matter enormously, getting this right carries even more weight.
People have always brought complicated lives into work. We are simply better at recognising that now.
What has not always kept pace is the way we prepare the people managing them.
Policies and specialist services are important, but at some point a real person still has to notice that something is wrong and decide what to say next.
Most of the time, that person is the manager.
Reflect Training & Consultancy works with organisations to strengthen workforce and manager capability around complex human issues including trauma, domestic abuse, substance use, mental health, neurodiversity, safeguarding and psychologically informed practice.
The focus is practical: helping people understand what they may be seeing, respond appropriately, maintain clear professional boundaries and know what should happen next.
For organisations reviewing whether their managers are genuinely equipped for the situations they now encounter, that is a conversation worth having.
