The Conflict Expert

Two people book a session with me most weeks who used to work well together. A project lead and a designer who finish each other’s sentences in half their meetings and snap at each other in the rest. A finance manager and an ops lead who now copy in a third person on every email, just in case. The leader who books the call almost always frames it the same way: “I think we’ve got a personality clash.”

Nine times out of ten, it isn’t. What’s changed isn’t who these two people are. It’s how much capacity they have left.

Burnout doesn’t just make people tired. It makes them harder to work with, and if you treat the symptom, the sharp tone, the withdrawn silence, the sudden formality, as a behaviour problem rather than a capacity problem, mediating it once won’t stop it coming back.

This matters more than it might sound. Acas’s most recent research found that 44% of working-age adults in Great Britain experienced conflict at work in the past year, the highest figure ever recorded, and 57% of those said it left them with stress, anxiety or depression. If burnout and workplace conflict are showing up together in your team right now, it’s worth understanding what’s driving it before deciding how to respond.

What Burnout Actually Is, and What It Isn’t

The WHO Definition Most Leaders Have Never Read

Most people use “burnout” loosely, as a synonym for tired, stressed or fed up. The World Health Organization’s actual definition, in the ICD-11, is more specific. Burnout is “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” with three dimensions: energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about the job, and reduced professional efficacy.

Two things matter here. First, the WHO classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, and says it should not describe experiences outside work. It’s a job-design diagnosis, not a personal-resilience one. If the job is generating it, individual resilience training won’t resolve it alone.

Second, look closely at the middle dimension. Psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, whose research underpins the WHO definition, describe burnout as “a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job,” and describe the cynicism dimension as including “irritability, loss of idealism, and withdrawal.” Irritability is written into the clinical definition of burnout. Most leaders read it as attitude.

Burnout vs Stress vs a Bad Week

The difference predicts what you’ll actually see. Stress tends to look like over-engagement: urgency, a fight to keep up, sometimes a short temper from trying too hard. Burnout looks like disengagement: a stop in caring whether the deadline gets hit at all. A stressed employee is still fighting for the outcome. A burnt-out one has quietly stopped believing the fight is worth it, and that’s a very different conversation to walk into.

Why Is Burnout Increasing? The 2026 Pressure Stack

Workload Is Still the Number One Driver

The honest framing here isn’t a spike. It’s a plateau at a dangerous level, which is arguably more concerning, because it means these conditions have quietly become normal. Mental Health UK’s most recent Burnout Report found 91% of UK adults experienced high or extreme pressure or stress in the past year, essentially unchanged across each of the last three years. One in five took stress-related sick leave, rising to 39% of 18 to 24 year olds. The top drivers: workload (42%), regular unpaid overtime (33%) and fear of redundancy (32%).

The official picture is worse, not better. The Health and Safety Executive reported 964,000 workers experienced work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, statistically significantly higher than the year before, accounting for 22.1 million lost working days, 62% of all days lost to work-related ill health.

The Always-On Day, and the Dose That Matters

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found the average knowledge worker now receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages on a typical weekday and is interrupted roughly every two minutes, with UK message volumes up more than 15% year on year. CIPD’s Good Work Index adds the dose-response that makes this a job-design argument rather than a character one: where UK employees describe their workload as “far too much,” 69% report a negative mental health impact, against 14% where workload feels about right.

Does Burnout Cause Conflict? What the Research Actually Shows

This is where the two ideas actually connect, and it’s worth sitting with, because the relationship runs in both directions. Conflict causes exhaustion. Exhaustion causes conflict. Most teams I work with aren’t dealing with a single cause. They’re stuck in a loop.

Exhaustion Strips Out Self-Regulation, So People Say the Thing

Regulating your reaction to a minor slight, letting a terse email go, absorbing a sharp comment without firing one back, takes energy. Emotional exhaustion depletes that reserve. In a study of 875 employees across Australia, Singapore and the Philippines, emotional exhaustion correlated significantly with experiencing incivility and with retaliating with incivility of one’s own. The researchers’ own title says it plainly: exhausted people lash out. Building genuine emotional intelligence matters here, not as a soft skill, but as the mechanism that determines whether someone absorbs friction or passes it straight along.

It’s a Spiral, Which Is Why Your Team Can’t Get Out of It

This is the single most useful idea in this piece. A meta-analysis pooling 65 longitudinal studies found conflict and interpersonal problems were associated with rising exhaustion over time. Meanwhile, Andersson and Pearson’s foundational incivility spiral theory, first published in the Academy of Management Review in 1999, describes how small discourtesies escalate into progressively more aggressive behaviour, with identifiable tipping points along the way. Put the two together and you get a closed loop: exhaustion produces friction, and friction produces more exhaustion. The practical implication for a leader is blunt. Asking who started it is close to the least useful question you can ask.

Burnout Is Contagious Across a Team

Exhaustion doesn’t stay contained to the person experiencing it. A two-wave study tracking 1,541 employees in a Dutch research organisation over a year found emotional exhaustion crossed over between people who worked closely together, explaining a third of the change in exhaustion levels across that period. McKinsey Health Institute research (fieldwork from 2022) found toxic workplace behaviour explained more than 60% of the variance in burnout symptoms and intention to leave, the single largest predictor identified, with highly exposed employees eight times more likely to report burnout symptoms.

None of this is surprising once you see the mechanism laid out. But it explains something leaders often find puzzling: why mediating a specific disagreement resolves the immediate conflict, but the tension is back within a month. You mediated the friction. You didn’t touch the exhaustion generating it.

Signs of Burnout in Your Team That Get Misread as Attitude Problems

This is the most useful section for spotting the pattern early, so it’s worth building as a proper contrast.

Burnout-driven conflict tends to look like this: a normally measured colleague starts reading neutral messages as criticism. Disagreements erupt over trivial things rather than anything substantive. Someone quietly withdraws from optional contact, the coffee chat, the casual Slack thread. Relationships that used to be easy develop a new, slightly stiff formality. The same argument keeps recurring without ever resolving.

Part of why leaders miss this: people don’t say it. Mental Health UK found 35% of UK workers aren’t comfortable discussing high or extreme stress with their manager, rising to 39% of 18 to 24 year olds. In the US, Eagle Hill Consulting’s 2025 workforce survey found only 42% of burnt-out employees had told their manager at all, and 42% of those said their manager then took no action. You’ll see the behaviour a long time before anyone tells you the cause. It also isn’t evenly distributed: Gallup’s most recent data found 31% of women report feeling burnt out “very often” or “always,” against 23% of men, and among managers specifically, 34% versus 27%.

Manager Burnout: Why the Person Handling the Conflict Is Often the One Closest to the Edge

This is the section that tends to land hardest, because if you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance it’s you.

Spans of control have widened sharply. Gallup found the average number of direct reports per manager rose from 10.9 to 12.1 in a single year, nearly 50% larger than the average team size in 2013, and 13% of managers now oversee 25 people or more. 97% of managers are still doing individual-contributor work on top of managing, a median of 40% of their time. The person expected to notice early tension and step in before it escalates is doing that job with less time, less training and a bigger team than at almost any point in the recent past.

Only 44% of managers globally report having received any management training at all. In the UK, just 29% of employers train line managers to support mental health, but where they do, 73% of those managers say they feel confident holding sensitive conversations, against 57% where there’s no training. The consequence is predictable: an exhausted, under-trained manager avoids the early, cheap conversation, and avoidance is exactly what turns ordinary friction into a formal grievance six months later.

New Flashpoints: AI “Workslop,” Return-to-Office Resentment, and Conflict in Hybrid Teams

Two newer pressures are showing up in mediation sessions that wouldn’t have appeared in a version of this article written even two years ago.

The first is what researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab have termed “workslop”: AI-generated work that looks polished but pushes the real thinking back onto whoever receives it. Their research found 40% of US desk workers had received workslop in the past month, each incident taking around two hours to resolve. What makes this a conflict issue rather than just a productivity one is the emotional residue: recipients report frustration, disengagement, and real discomfort about confronting the sender. The answer isn’t avoiding AI altogether: Gallup found engagement runs at 48% where a manager actively supports AI use, against 30% where they don’t. The problem is unmanaged AI, not AI itself.

The second is return-to-office resentment, and it runs deeper than the commute. BambooHR’s research with over 1,500 US managers found one in five HR professionals admitted the in-office policy was partly intended to encourage people to quit. Employees increasingly suspect this, which changes how “everyone back in” actually lands, and it doesn’t land evenly. ONS data shows UK graduates are ten times more likely to have hybrid access than people with no formal qualifications. A blanket policy applied to an unevenly distributed benefit is a reliable source of team resentment.

Multigenerational Team Conflict, and the Rise of the AI-Drafted Difficult Conversation

Five generations are now sharing the same workplace, and research from People Management found the friction they report is overwhelmingly about communication style rather than actual competence: 42% of employers and 40% of jobseekers name different communication expectations as the biggest problem in multigenerational teams.

Layered on top: younger employees are increasingly rehearsing conflict through AI before they have it with a human. Resume.org’s survey of Gen Z workers found 76% use AI chatbots at work, and 94% of those had used one specifically to navigate a workplace issue. It genuinely helps some people, 43% felt more confident afterward, but 43% also said the AI reinforced their initial, biased reading of the situation. The honest position isn’t that AI is bad for conflict. It’s excellent at helping someone regulate before they reply, and equally good at confirming whatever they already believed.

The Cost of Workplace Conflict in the UK, and the 2026 Compliance Clock

What Unresolved Conflict Actually Costs

The scale is already established: 44% of working-age adults in Great Britain experienced conflict at work in the last year, most often with a colleague (39%) or their own line manager (32%). Only around half said it was actually resolved, and fewer than one in ten used any formal grievance or capability process. Most conflict just sits there.

The cost gap between catching it early and letting it run is the most useful number here for a budget-holder. Acas estimates that managing formal disciplinary and grievance procedures costs UK employers roughly £2.36 billion a year, against approximately £250 million for informal resolution, around ten times less. Acas’s often-repeated £28.5 billion figure for the total annual cost of conflict is worth knowing, but it’s a 2021 estimate and should be treated as historical context rather than a current number.

What Changes for UK Employers from Late 2026

This turns “we should probably deal with this at some point” into “we need to deal with this now.” From 1 October 2026, most employment tribunal claim time limits double from three months to six. From 30 October 2026, employers face a new duty to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, with third-party harassment protections extended further. And from 1 January 2027, the unfair dismissal qualifying period drops from two years to six months, with the compensation cap removed entirely (a reduced qualifying period, not day-one rights). None of these changes make unresolved conflict more likely. They make it considerably more expensive when it happens.

Enforcement is catching up too. The Health and Safety Executive served a Notice of Contravention on the University of Birmingham in December 2025, finding it lacked effective arrangements to manage work-related stress risk. Having a wellbeing policy is not the same thing as having an effective one, and regulators are starting to test the difference.

None of this is legal advice, and if you’re facing a live dispute, Acas and your own employment adviser are the right first call. But from a conflict-management perspective, this is exactly the moment to move from reactive to structural. If your organisation needs a fuller assessment of where the risk sits, that’s precisely what conflict consulting is designed to do.

How to Prevent Burnout in Your Team Without Turning It Into a Wellbeing Tick-Box

Fix the Conditions Before You Fix the People

Resilience training aimed purely at individuals can’t fix a workload problem, however well designed. If the job itself is generating the exhaustion, asking people to meditate through it treats the wrong layer entirely. HSE’s Management Standards are the most useful free framework available: six controllable causes of work-related stress, demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. Relationships is explicitly one of the six, and HSE’s own guidance includes trouble with relationships at work and bullying within it. Burnout and conflict aren’t two separate problems sitting next to each other. In HSE’s own framework, they’re the same category.

A Few Places to Start This Month

Feedback is the highest-value, lowest-cost lever available. Gallup’s data found meaningful feedback delivered at least weekly nearly triples the proportion of genuinely engaged employees, regardless of team size. Manager training moves the needle too; one recent analysis found it lifted manager thriving from 28% to 34%. It’s worth being honest about the limits of an EAP alone: Mental Health UK found only 27% of UK workers believe mental health support is genuinely prioritised where they work, and 18% describe it as a tick-box exercise. The strongest single factor in the UK data might be the simplest: CIPD’s most recent Good Work Index found job satisfaction sits at 38% under bottom-quartile line management, against 89% under top-quartile.

How to Open the Conversation

Two conversations get conflated constantly. There’s the behaviour conversation (what’s happening between two people right now) and the workload conversation (what’s generating the exhaustion underneath it). Have both, but separately. Name the pattern you’re observing without diagnosing the person: “I’ve noticed things feel tenser between you two lately” lands very differently to “what’s your problem with each other.” And go early, and go informally. The cost of catching this in month one is a fraction of the cost of catching it in month six. If you want a fuller structure for exactly this kind of conversation, it’s worth reading through how to give difficult feedback without damaging the relationship.

When to Bring in Workplace Conflict Mediation

Most burnout-driven conflict, caught early, is something a leader can handle directly, with the conversation structure above and a real look at the underlying workload. But there are situations where bringing in a neutral third party is the right call rather than a sign you’ve failed as a manager: when the conflict involves the line manager themselves, when it’s been running for weeks without change, when a formal process has started or been threatened, or when the same conversation keeps happening on a loop with no movement.

The cost asymmetry from earlier is worth remembering here too. Informal resolution runs at roughly a tenth of the cost of a formal process, and mediation sits squarely on the cheaper, earlier side of that line.

If any of this sounds like where your team is right now, I’d welcome a conversation about it. You can book a free 20-minute discovery call and we’ll talk through what’s actually going on. If ongoing support for a manager or a team feels like the better fit, conflict coaching is worth a look too.