Use this bank to probe how candidates shape culture day‑to‑day—not posters on walls, but the behaviors, rituals, and systems that people actually experience. Each section includes prompts and cues for what strong answers demonstrate.

Values & Principles in Action

• What are the 3 most important cultural values for you, and how have you operationalized them?
  Good answers: Specific behaviors, examples, and mechanisms (rituals, docs, metrics) over slogans.
• Describe a time you made a difficult trade‑off to uphold a value.
  Good answers: Clear stakes, principle applied, short‑term cost accepted, long‑term trust gained.
• How do you keep values from becoming “performative”?
  Good answers: Tie to hiring, promotion, feedback, and decision criteria; removes incentives that conflict.
• What behaviors do you reward and which do you discourage?
  Good answers: Concrete signals (recognition, opportunities) and zero‑tolerance for values breaches.
• Share a time you changed your mind about a cultural norm.
  Good answers: Evidence‑based shift, inclusive process, communicated rationale.

Psychological Safety & Inclusion

• How do you create conditions where people speak up?
  Good answers: Meeting facilitation (round‑robins, anonymous inputs), reaction norms, leadership vulnerability.
• Tell me about surfacing a hard truth to leadership.
  Good answers: Facts first, respectful framing, action taken, trust increased.
• What practices support inclusion in day‑to‑day work?
  Good answers: Accessible docs, inclusive language, timezone fairness, diverse reviewers.
• How do you handle microaggressions or bias when you see it?
  Good answers: Interrupts behavior, supports impacted person, follows with education and systemic fixes.
• How do you measure psychological safety?
  Good answers: Pulse surveys, speak‑up metrics, dissent quality, skip‑levels.

Collaboration, Conflict & Trust

• Tell me about resolving a conflict between teams.
  Good answers: Shared goals, clear decision owner, options/trade‑offs, and written agreement.
• How do you build trust quickly with a new team?
  Good answers: Early wins, reliable commitments, transparent decisions, and credit‑sharing.
• What’s your approach to healthy debate?
  Good answers: Steelmanning, red‑team sessions, decision logs; disagree‑and‑commit after call.
• Describe a time you rebuilt trust after a miss.
  Good answers: Owns outcome, communicates fix, sets safeguards, and follows through.
• How do you avoid silo behavior?
  Good answers: Shared OKRs, cross‑functional rituals, rotation programs, and open roadmaps.

Feedback, Coaching & Accountability

• How do you make feedback normal, safe, and frequent?
  Good answers: Cadence (weekly 1:1s), templates, examples library, ask culture.
• Tell me about giving tough feedback that improved performance.
  Good answers: Behavior‑impact framing, clear expectations, follow‑up and measurable change.
• What do you do when a high performer hurts culture?
  Good answers: Direct coaching; if no change, remove privileges/role—values over output.
• How do you create fair accountability?
  Good answers: Clear definitions of done, public commitments, retros without blame, consequence consistency.
• How do you celebrate learning from mistakes?
  Good answers: Blameless postmortems, recognition for transparency, systemic fixes.

Rituals, Communication & Cadence

• Which rituals define your teams?
  Good answers: Demos, WBRs, retros, standups with purpose; periodic review of ritual ROI.
• How do you run effective hybrid meetings?
  Good answers: Remote‑first facilitation, inclusive tools, written pre‑reads and recaps.
• What artifacts keep everyone aligned?
  Good answers: One‑pagers, decision logs, roadmaps, status updates with BLUF.
• How do you minimize churn from communication debt?
  Good answers: Documentation norms, async updates, clear SLAs, single source of truth.
• Share a ritual you killed or redesigned.
  Good answers: Evidence of low value, new format, measured improvement.

Decision‑Making & Empowerment

• How do you define decision rights?
  Good answers: DACI/RACI clarity, decider named, when to escalate, lock periods.
• Tell me about pushing authority down.
  Good answers: Guardrails, training, post‑decision review; faster, better outcomes.
• How do you balance consensus and speed?
  Good answers: Align on criteria, limited discussion windows, disagree‑and‑commit.
• Example of a transparent decision process.
  Good answers: Pre‑reads, options/trade‑offs, feedback window, decision log.
• How do you handle repeated reversals?
  Good answers: Evidence threshold for change, change control, learnings captured.

Recognition, Rewards & Motivation

• What behaviors do you recognize publicly?
  Good answers: Collaboration, customer obsession, craftsmanship, learning—not heroics.
• How do you keep motivation high without burnout?
  Good answers: Sustainable pace, autonomy, mastery, purpose; fair workload and recovery.
• Describe your approach to equitable recognition.
  Good answers: Rotating spotlights, evidence‑based nominations, bias checks.
• What non‑monetary rewards work best?
  Good answers: Scope, learning budgets, mentorship, time for experiments.
• How do you prevent hero culture?
  Good answers: Reward systems favor teams, sustainable throughput, documented processes.

Hiring, Onboarding & Offboarding

• How do you hire for culture add (not clone)?
  Good answers: Structured rubrics, diverse panels, behavior evidence, calibration.
• Describe your 30‑60‑90 onboarding culture plan.
  Good answers: Docs to read, buddy system, early wins, feedback loops.
• How do you share norms with new joiners?
  Good answers: Written “how we work,” examples, anti‑patterns, decision rights.
• What do you learn from exits?
  Good answers: Structured exit interviews, theme tracking, concrete action items.
• Tell me about changing a hiring signal that was hurting culture.
  Good answers: Evidence, replaced with better predictor, measured improvement.

Remote/Hybrid Norms

• How do you avoid proximity bias?
  Good answers: Outcome‑oriented evaluation, rotation of visibility, async defaults.
• What are your response‑time norms?
  Good answers: SLAs by channel, urgent tags, quiet hours, and coverage plans.
• How do you keep culture strong across time zones?
  Good answers: Distributed rituals, recorded updates, handoff notes, inclusive scheduling.
• How do you design offices/offsites to support culture?
  Good answers: Purposeful in‑person time, no “tourism,” outcomes tracked.
• What practices keep documentation living?
  Good answers: Owners, review cadence, “last updated,” and tooling.

Ethics, Safety & Integrity

• How do you handle ethical dilemmas that test culture?
  Good answers: Clear red lines, escalation, transparency to stakeholders.
• What do you do when a culture initiative backfires?
  Good answers: Listen, acknowledge, adjust; share learnings.
• How do you protect psychological safety during layoffs or crises?
  Good answers: Honest comms, humane processes, resources for support.
• How do you ensure fairness in promotions and opportunities?
  Good answers: Transparent criteria, evidence packets, calibration, audits by cohort.
• What’s your approach to confidentiality and trust?
  Good answers: Clear boundaries for private vs. shareable info; secure systems.

Health, Sustainability & Ways of Working

• How do you create a high‑performance culture without burnout?
  Good answers: Focus, realistic planning, recovery, ask‑for‑help norms, and capacity buffers.
• What do you do when speed starts to erode quality?
  Good answers: Guardrails, quality gates, post‑launch reviews, and capacity resets.
• How do you normalize taking time off?
  Good answers: Coverage plans, leaders model behavior, no “vacation shaming.”
• Which meeting norms do you enforce?
  Good answers: Agenda, timeboxing, decision/next steps, default 25/50 mins, end early when done.
• What are your “stop doing” practices?
  Good answers: Regular ritual audit, sunset ceremonies, experiment to remove waste.

Case Study Exercises

• Ritual audit: Redesign your team’s weekly cadence to improve focus and inclusion.
• Values in action: Write a one‑pager turning 3 values into observable behaviors and mechanisms.
• Conflict playbook: Draft a facilitation plan for a high‑stakes cross‑team dispute.
• Recognition plan: Propose a fair recognition program that avoids hero culture.
• Remote norms: Create a “how we work” doc for a distributed team across 3 time zones.

Tip: Look for leaders who change systems, not just people—who make good behavior easy, harmful behavior hard, and belonging the default.