I’ve been hooked on Slow Horses, the Apple TV series about British intelligence misfits led by the off-putting Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman). In some ways, Lamb reminds me of the “maverick managers” I write about in my book: those in leadership positions who bolster trust by breaking professional norms. I’ll return to them in a later post.
This week’s season-five finale, though, offered a scene that spoke to a different chapter: about the labor we invest in our workplace relationships because they are so consequential. I argue that our relationships at work are made up of heavy ties: bonds that serve as lifelines in today’s precarious workplaces but that demand constant tending.
As part of that chapter, I discuss the labor of “buffering,” the work that middle managers do to absorb conflict, toxicity, and risk to protect those with less organizational power. One scene in that final Slow Horses episode captures it perfectly. (Spoilers ahead.)
Lamb sits across from MI5’s polished but largely useless director, Claude Whelan. Whelan thinks he’s come to deliver the death sentence for Slough House, the outpost Lamb leads. Lamb raises an eyebrow at the attempt, a gesture of weary amusement edged with cynicism. “You do remember yesterday, right?” he asks. “When one of my team saved your life?”
When Whelan attempts to rewrite the narrative, Lamb pulls out a small recorder. On it is Whelan’s own voice, confessing to blackmail and an affair. The power in the room shifts instantly. Whelan caves. Slough House will stay.
But Lamb isn’t finished. He wants his disgraced agent, Roddy Ho, reinstated. “And who do you propose we pin this on?” Whelan asks. “We pin it on the chump who deserves to go,” Lamb replies: “You.”
That exchange is a masterclass in buffering: the invisible labor of those caught between power and subordination, holding the system’s tensions just long enough for it to steady. In Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us, I examine the dynamics of heavy ties across multiple workplaces, including the often obscured work of buffering. Lamb’s move to protect his team illuminates broader patterns I observed across workplaces:
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Institutional failures leave workers vulnerable to layoffs and susceptible to wage theft, creating conditions where you’d expect apathy, resentment, or disengagement to take hold. Yet most workplaces aren’t defined by that kind of detachment. One reason is that the labor of buffering fills the gaps left by institutional neglect.
Take Constance, a middle manager at DTC Marketing. She coached junior staff through impossible client demands, translated sharp emails from executives into constructive missives, and made sure her team didn’t work overtime unnecessarily. Her efforts created what I call a “humanity bubble”—a small pocket of care and stability that made an otherwise punishing environment feel safe. People stayed longer and worked harder because of her.
Buffers like Constance make work feel worth showing up for. But their care also binds both their teams—and themselves—to systems that don’t value them. Those who worked closely with Constance said they stayed at DTC because of her. And Constance stayed too, long after being passed up for a promotion, because she didn’t want to abandon her junior colleagues, whom she feared would be lost without her.
While I never observed Constance exploiting that trust, buffering creates a dependency on individuals who act as the workplace’s informal “translators” and “protectors.” In the wrong hands, that dependency can open the door to abuse: the self-proclaimed “ally” who violates a boundary, or the “good” manager whose empathy slowly turns into leverage. Lamb does save the “slow horses,” but he’s no savior—he frequently berates his team, who nevertheless remain devoted to him. Slough House is the very definition of a bad, dysfunctional workplace.
In my research, women and people of color in middle-management roles performed a disproportionate share of buffering labor. This wasn’t because they were naturally better at buffering; it was structural. Lamb of course is a white male, but he’s also disgraced and marginalized within MI5. He’s the default buffer at Slough House because structurally his team has no one else to turn to. In workplaces where representation thins as you move up the hierarchy, tokenized managers become the default “safe” person for workers who don’t see themselves reflected at the top. The result is that women and people of color, especially those in middle management, are pulled into emotional caretaking and conflict absorption that go far beyond their formal job descriptions.
Paige, a manager at The Jones, described this dynamic clearly: “A few people have come up to me and said it’s nice to have a manager of color… they feel comfortable coming to me just because of that.” We all appreciated Paige: She noticed when you’d had a rough night and quietly shifted your section so you could catch your breath. She listened without judgment, diffused tension when customers lashed out, and found small ways to make the job bearable, even fun. She was the manager everyone hoped to see on the schedule each shift, the one whose presence meant the day or night might go just a little bit smoother.
But buffering labor was largely invisible to those at the top, and it rarely showed up in meaningful ways during performance reviews. At times, it even placed managers like Paige in the crosshairs between worker and managerial interests. Because she had the ear of both her team and upper management, she often found herself in the middle of conflicts that weren’t hers to solve. For instance, when she mentioned in passing to her supervisor that a couple of bartenders were stressed, the comment was escalated without her consent. Senior leaders confronted the bartenders directly, undermining the trust she had built and making a bad situation worse. It took her weeks to repair the damage.
For tokenized managers, buffering often creates a ceiling of its own: the more they stabilize a broken system, the more entrapped they become. Their steadiness is rewarded with more responsibility but rarely more power. Like Lamb, they become stuck in their role, unable to move. What looks like trust from above is often reliance, and what feels like loyalty from below can become a kind of tether.
When systems rely on individual relationships to hold them together, stability becomes precarious, dependent on who stays, who leaves, and who still has the energy to care. Often, a single manager serves as the hinge holding the workplace in balance, quietly bending rules or absorbing tension so others can keep going. But when that hinge gives way—when the individual is reassigned, laid off, or simply burns out and resigns—the burden they were carrying doesn’t vanish. It drops, landing squarely on the workers below.
The weight falls downward because a hierarchy of trustworthiness deems only those at the top as deserving of protection. Senior leaders are buffered by contracts, severance packages, and legal safeguards that secure their futures even when things go wrong. By contrast, those at the bottom are treated as inherently suspect, subject to surveillance and compelled to sign away their rights through non-competes, NDAs, and arbitration agreements.
While Lamb may have protected his team this time, they remain just as vulnerable moving forward. He won’t be at Slough House forever, and when he leaves, the entire protective edifice he’s created will undoubtedly come crashing down on the heads of the remaining “slow horses.” And while Whelan may be gone, he no doubt had a parachute to soften his fall.
Heavy ties reveal how care and exploitation often live side by side. The same relationships that make work bearable also sustain the systems that wear people down. Buffering offers a measure of relief, but it’s a stopgap: a fragile patch that merely masks the deeper structural damage. In such instances, the social fabric holds, but only because someone is straining with all their might to keep it from tearing.
Other updates:
Trust Fall officially comes out next week (Tuesday, November 11th)! You can support the launch by:
Pre-ordering through any of the links on my website
Posting about it on social media (especially alongside a picture of you with the book!)
Also, in case you missed it, see coverage of the book below:
UGA’s Red & Black feature
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