Law.com – “A law firm’s culture is defined by what is rewarded, what is tolerated, what is overlooked, and what is punished. At many firms, the outcome is jarringly different from what leadership might want – By Jordan Furlong. An employee of your law firm approaches their supervisor and asks for a few days off to deal with an unspecified personal matter. They promise to return to work next Monday. How does the supervisor respond? Your answer to that question, and the reasoning by which you reach it, will illuminate your law firm’s culture. And by culture, I don’t mean the self-admiring corporate puffery on your website. I mean the actual, on-the-ground reality of what it’s really like to work at your firm. You need to know what that is in order to lead your law firm through the “Great Resignation” and the even more challenging times that will follow. Most law firm leaders think of culture as some ephemeral quality that invisibly shapes and defines the firm’s positive and unique professional environment. They have it almost exactly backwards. Culture is not something you artfully design and direct. Culture is an outcome. It’s a continuous, everyday reality check on what kind of firm you’re actually running. A law firm’s culture is the daily manifestation of the firm’s explicit performance expectations and its implicit behavioral norms—what is rewarded, what is tolerated, what is overlooked, and what is punished. Add up all these actions and inactions, and you’ll get a pretty accurate picture of your firm’s culture. Just be aware that that picture might be jarringly dissimilar to the one you imagine. Throughout all the pandemic disruption of law offices, I’ve heard managing partners and senior lawyers say they want people back in the office full-time because hybrid and work-from-home arrangements are damaging the firm’s culture. (Nobody else in the firm seems to share that worry, interestingly.)…”