"We have a great company culture.” Who doesn't?

Every company I've worked with has touted its company culture -- "innovation," "respect," "reward excellence," and so on.  However, these words often don't describe the culture as much as the values of an organization, which are often very similar. Those of us who place high value on workplace culture have learned how to mine for this information during a job interview.  In 2015 Adam Grant reminded us in this NY Times article to ask multiple people during an interview process to identify what a company would really be like to work for by asking about how meetings are conducted and what’s accomplished, as meetings are a practice that consumes more than half of the time of leaders in big organizations.

To this question I'd add, "Please describe what happened with your job duties and special projects the last time you took time off.  How did you remain connected while you were away?"  If you're like me, you'll be looking for a place to work where projects progress when a leader is away and not regularly checking in by email or cell phone.  And I'd ask for concrete examples of recent small and large decisions made by the senior leadership -- with follow-up questions galore about each example. These questions will get to the reality of how work gets done and tell you about the company's often unstated culture around teamwork, collaboration, delegation, and decision-making.