Celebrating MD Anderson’s Core Values

Core values are integral to any organization. Throughout my leadership journey, I have had the privilege of seeing how a values-based culture can establish mission-centric behavioral expectations, empower employees and lead to extraordinary outcomes. As each company’s mission describes the “why” of their work, core values make up the cultural engine that powers this mission and illustrate the “who.”

[Our Core Values] play a vital role in shaping our culture and ensuring all our colleagues are driven by the same values each day as we work to end cancer.

MD Anderson's Core Values

At MD Anderson, our Core Values of Caring, Integrity, and Discovery have guided our excellence in patient care, research, education and prevention. They govern the ways we operate, make decisions and hold ourselves accountable. They play a vital role in shaping our culture and ensuring all our colleagues are driven by the same values each day as we work to end cancer.

While these three Core Values have served us exceptionally well, collective experiences from the last few years have called for us to reflect on what our values mean to us. As an organization, we have focused on values-based leadership and diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as the formal planning of our Strategy and institutional responses to challenges such as COVID-19 and economic headwinds.

These experiences uncovered truths about ourselves and have led to two new core values: Safety and Stewardship.

Safety is at the heart of everything we do

As the nation’s leading cancer center and a high-reliability organization, safety underpins everything we do. The once-in-a-century global pandemic has driven home the necessity of protecting the health and safety of our patients and employees above all else, and our Core Value of Safety will continue to reflect this priority.

Our focus does not stop at physical safety. Rather, it also encompasses the psychological safety and well-being of our workforce. As an institution, we are committed to fostering an environment where our employees feel included, respected and empowered to speak up and keep one another free from harm.

Stewardship protects and preserves our institution

The notion of stewardship is linked fundamentally to MD Anderson’s role as an agency of the State of Texas. It defines our responsibility to protect our institutional reputation, as well as the precious resources entrusted to us for the maximum benefit of the society we serve. This means looking after the well-being of our talent, collaborating to safeguard finances and participating in a collective awareness of how we use the precious time, data and materials afforded to us.

Redefining our existing values

In addition to defining these two new Core Values, our institution has revisited and refreshed our values of Caring, Integrity and Discovery. Through inclusive exercises and focus groups with our employees, we looked at how our current values reflect who we are today and how we want to operate in the future. This refresh aligns our Core Values with the behaviors and actions that are important for me as a leader, and what I want our institution to be known for; including, respect, trust, compassion, accountability, professionalism, innovation, diversity, lifelong learning and teamwork. Together, along with other behaviors and actions, these encourage all of us to continuously set, meet and exceed high standards for ourselves and each other, thereby amplifying our mission to end cancer.  

Using our Core Values to fuel our bold aspiration

It is an exciting time for our institution as we couple the historic launch of our new Strategy with a celebration of our Core Values. Many of our employees have shared inspiring reflections on what our Core Values mean to them.

It gives me great pride to know the impact our values will have on our future. It will enable meaningful and compassionate experiences for our patients. It will amplify the professional growth of our teammates and our community. And it will energize a new generation of clinicians, scientists, educators and other health care professionals at MD Anderson as we carry out our goal of Making Cancer History?.

Our Core Values will allow us to build on our esteemed 80-year history as we prepare for our future. Through collective actions that reflect Caring, Integrity, Discovery, Safety and Stewardship, we are unified and ready to maximize our impact on humanity to finally end cancer.