The Toleration Test for the culture you actually have.

Most firms have a values statement. Few could say when it last changed a decision. Meanwhile everyone in the building can tell you which partner never completes a file review, whose timesheets arrive a fortnight late without comment, and which behaviour gets waved through with “that's just how they are.”

That second list is the culture. The Toleration Test is a way of writing it down, deliberately, with the people who have the power to change it in the room.

The six questions

1. What behaviour do we say we value?
2. What behaviour do we actually reward?
3. What behaviour do we excuse if someone bills well?
4. What behaviour do staff believe is pointless to challenge?
5. What behaviour from partners undermines how the firm is meant to run?
6. What would a new joiner learn about “how things really work” in their first month?

Question 3 does most of the work. Nearly every small firm has an answer to it, and nearly every small firm has never said it out loud.

How to run it

Session one: the partners — 60 minutes

All equity partners, plus the practice manager. Not tacked onto the end of a partners' meeting; this is the meeting.

• Ten minutes, in silence. Everyone writes their own answers before anyone speaks. Skip this and you will get the senior partner's answers, six times.
• Forty minutes, question by question. The facilitator collects every answer on a flipchart before any discussion. Behaviours, not people — “late timesheets go unchallenged above associate level”, not “David”.
• Ten minutes to agree what goes to session two. Nothing is decided yet.

Session two: a cross-section of staff — 60 minutes

Six to eight people across grades and teams: a paralegal, a secretary, an associate, someone from accounts, someone who joined this year. Same questions, same silent start. No partners in the room. The practice manager runs it — or, if the practice manager is too close to the answers, someone external.

Tell the group exactly what happens next: the partners will see the themes, not who said what, and the firm will report back what it's going to do within a month.

Then put the two lists side by side

Where both rooms named the same behaviour, you have something the firm already knows and has chosen to live with. Where only the staff room named it, you have something the partners genuinely can't see. Both are worth having. The second is why you ran two sessions.

The untouchable biller

Most firms' answer to question 3 is one person, sometimes two. They bill £400k in a firm where the average is £180k. They also lose a secretary every ten months, ignore the matter-opening process, and are the reason the last two associates left.

The partners usually know. What they haven't done is the arithmetic. Put a number on it: recruitment fees and lost productivity for each leaver (a working figure of £15k–£25k per fee-earner replaced is not unreasonable), the write-offs on the files they supervise, the management hours spent smoothing things over. It rarely cancels out £400k. It does turn “that's just how they are” from a shrug into a price the firm is choosing to pay — and makes it possible to ask whether it wants to keep paying it.

From answers to standards

The output isn't a new values statement. It's three to five observable standards — things you could watch someone do or not do. Compare:

• “We respect our colleagues” — not observable.
• “Nobody raises their voice at a colleague. If it happens, it is raised with them the same week, whoever they are” — observable.
• “Time is recorded by 10am the next working day, by everyone, and the list of who hasn't goes to the managing partner on Friday” — observable.
• “File reviews happen in the month they're due. Supervisors who miss two running explain why at the partners' meeting” — observable.

Pick the ones that came up in both rooms. Three that hold are worth more than ten that don't.

The standards apply upwards

This is the part that decides whether the exercise was worth doing. A standard that binds associates and exempts partners isn't a standard, it's a rank. Staff will test it within a fortnight, usually by watching what happens the first time a partner breaks it.

So agree two things before you announce anything:

• Who speaks to a partner who breaches a standard. It has to be another partner — normally the managing partner. It cannot be the practice manager. They can report the pattern; they don't have the standing to enforce it on an owner, and asking them to is how firms lose good practice managers.
• What happens on repeat. A ladder the partners have agreed in advance: a private conversation; a recorded conversation; a consequence in the partner's appraisal or profit share; and, at the far end, a conversation about whether they belong in the firm. If the partners can't agree a ladder in the abstract, they won't apply one to a colleague.

Protect the person telling the truth

In most small firms the practice manager already knows the answers to all six questions. Staff tell them what they would never say in front of a partner. The test only works if that person is allowed to say what they know without paying for it.

In practice that means the managing partner saying, in the partners' meeting and in front of the practice manager: “I've asked for this, and I want it unvarnished.” And then not flinching at the first uncomfortable item. How the room reacts to the first hard truth decides whether there is ever a second.

Family feel, family dysfunction

Many small firms are proud of feeling like a family, and at its best that means loyalty, flexibility, and people who look after each other through bad years. The Toleration Test isn't an attack on that.

But “we're a family” is also the phrase most often used to avoid an adult conversation. The question to ask is whether closeness is being used to avoid clarity. A firm can be warm and insist that everyone records their time. Most people find the second makes the first easier to believe.

What good looks like at month six

Three or four standards on one page that everyone can recite. A partner who has been spoken to about one of them, and staff who know it happened without needing the details. A practice manager who brings the pattern to the partners monthly without bracing first. And a second run of the test booked for next year — alongside one or two of the other measures — so the firm can see whether the list of tolerated behaviour is getting shorter.