Getting to Know the 2025 NOC Keynote

Each year, clinical leaders, cancer program administrators, and other members of the multidisciplinary cancer care team converge at the ACCC National Oncology Conference (NOC) to learn, connect, and be inspired by what the brightest minds are doing to advance high-quality, equitable cancer care. This year, the ACCC 42nd NOC will take place on October 15–17 in Denver, Colorado, where hundreds of oncology professionals will have the opportunity to attend a Psychosocial Oncology Professionals Symposium preconference, hear directly from the six 2025 ACCC Innovator Award winners in dedicated sessions, and learn from our keynote speaker, Susan Reilly Salgado, PhD.

Driven by a desire to help institutions leverage a strong and healthy culture to achieve outstanding results, Dr. Salgado is a consultant and speaker specializing in organizational culture, leadership, and customer experience, whose best practices have been successfully implemented across more than 20 different industries. To learn more about her background, her work in the health care space, and what to expect from her keynote at the upcoming NOC, ACCCBuzz spoke with Dr. Salgado about her 2 decades of experience making employees feel engaged and invested.

ACCCBuzz: How did your passion for organizational culture begin?

Dr. Salgado: In the late 1990s, I was a graduate student at the NYU Stern School of Business, pursuing a PhD in organizational behavior. I was really interested in how people could provide a source of sustainable competitive advantage for an organization. In other words, how can you create a team of people who are so committed and dedicated to their work that they do it better than anyone, and can give you a competitive advantage in your industry? That really coincides with this idea of organizational culture and creating great workplaces where people thrive and feel genuinely valued and appreciated.

ACCCBuzz: Tell us about your work with the founder of Shake Shack. How did that experience shape the direction of your career?

Dr. Salgado: I got to the point in my program where I needed a research site to study my ideas, and I wanted to go out into the field and study something “real.” I had been a regular guest at a restaurant in New York City called Union Square Cafe. The owner, Danny Meyer, later went on to open a number of other restaurants—including, probably the best known nationally, Shake Shack—all with the cultural tenet, “We take care of each other first.” In 1999, I had a chance meeting with Danny, and was able to persuade him to let me study his restaurants for my dissertation research.

My methodology was participant observation, which entails becoming part of the phenomenon you are studying. In practice, I worked at Union Square Cafe as a host-reservationist while conducting interviews and other forms of qualitative and quantitative research. By the time I finished my doctoral degree 3 years later, I had fallen in love with this company. And while I had originally planned to be an academic, do research, and teach at a university, I really loved what Danny was doing and the ethos he had, and I wanted to pursue that further. So, I carved a job description for myself out of the work I was doing and persuaded him to hire me as Director of Culture and Learning for his restaurants.

I spent the next 7 years doing that work internally and building a blueprint for transferring culture from one business unit to the next as the company continues to grow. In 2009, we created a consulting business called Hospitality Quotient, through which we turned these ideas outward, and I provided the same services to other organizations that I had provided to Union Square Hospitality Group.

ACCCBuzz: Why is speaking at the 42nd National Oncology Conference meaningful to you on a personal level?

Dr. Salgado: I’ve been at many hospital bedsides over the years, some of them for cancer and some for other things. I myself was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and am still undergoing hormone treatments, and it is so important as a patient to feel like the staff genuinely care about you when you call or when you walk in the door. Throughout the process of deciding where to receive my treatment, just having to say the words “I was just diagnosed with breast cancer” aloud was a painful reality to come to terms with. When there’s a compassionate voice on the other end of the line, it means everything.

It’s easy for staff to jump into the logistical aspects of oncology, especially when they feel pressed for time. Yet abundance of time is the most important thing we can give to people. That doesn’t mean we necessarily have more time; it’s about how we make people feel about the time we do have together. When we are present with others, when we’re looking them in the eye and really listening to them, it makes these moments we have together feel so much more impactful.

Health care professionals tend to self-select into this field. In other words, if you didn’t genuinely care about people, you probably wouldn’t have signed up for this kind of job. My hope is to reconnect attendees to that compassion and empathy that makes health care so much more meaningful, and to demonstrate that the best patient experiences will come from team members who work well together, who are respectful to one another, and who feel genuinely cared for by their leadership. That’s the heart of my messaging, and it is more important than ever in this field.

ACCCBuzz: What themes are you seeing in workplace culture today across different industries?

Dr. Salgado: Most prominently, we’re seeing the integration of multiple generations into one workforce—specifically, generations that have grown up so differently from one another. Today, baby boomers are working alongside Gen Z, the latter of whom has never known life without hand-held technology. Understandably, this can create significant challenges for many organizations, and this is where culture plays a powerful role. It cannot be permissible in the company culture to complain about one another—whether it’s because you don’t like someone’s work style or because you think their generation is lazy and doesn’t want to work. You can’t allow those biases, stereotypes, and toxicity into the culture.

As a member of Gen X, I remember people saying similar things about my generation when we entered the workforce 30-40 years ago: We were lazy and we didn’t want to work. But someone in our career helped us to overcome that. Someone more senior helped us learn the ropes, took us under their wing, and taught us how to work. The same must be true today: we must remember how important it is for a more experienced member of a team to support younger generations as they enter the workforce. If younger employees come in and all they feel is judgment and negativity, they won’t stay, and the organization will unwittingly create its own revolving door of employees.

ACCCBuzz: What themes are you seeing specifically in the health care landscape?

Dr. Salgado: Health care has always been hard. You’re dealing with people in the most vulnerable times of their lives—even when they’re healthy. And anxious or sick people can be very hard to deal with. So that’s our baseline. Then you layer in the changes in the health care field over the last 10 years, from how hospitals are structured to how insurance companies and Medicare pay for services, and you’re amping up the stress. Add to that the struggles coming out of COVID: provider burnout, excessive admin time, and difficulty with technology integration like the electronic health record. These are all major contributors to culture in health care.

At the root of many of these challenges is, quite simply, busyness. When people are too busy, it is hard to stay on top of everything. Things like culture or interpersonal relationships are usually the first to start to slide, because no lives are on the line. But a lack of accountability is a surefire way to lose a good culture. It’s so important to hold people accountable to the culture, because it makes an organization more effective and efficient in the long run. It’s a time investment that pays off with stronger relationships, better teamwork, better patient experiences, and ultimately, better patient outcomes.

ACCCBuzz: What benefit does the creation of a positive work culture have on staff members and the organization as a whole?

Dr. Salgado: When people feel truly valued and respected, that's when we get the best out of them. I went back to school searching for this idea of how people could be a source of competitive advantage for organizations. And I found that when you have a strong culture and people feel cared for, they will go above and beyond. Whatever metrics you’re striving for—whether it’s patient care, excellence, quality, innovation, creativity—you have to embed that in your culture, and hold people accountable to it. You will need to hire people who are well-suited to that kind of culture, give them the tools and resources they need to do their jobs, and then create a caring workplace where they thrive. Then you will get the best out of your team, and that sentiment will naturally spill into the patient experience.

ACCCBuzz: How do these principles translate to business leaders, clinicians, and cancer care staff?

Dr. Salgado: For those in leadership roles, the message is that they must role model the behavior they want to see and that they are responsible for ensuring that employees live up to the same standard of acceptable behavior. That includes the understanding that when you turn a blind eye and ignore behavior, you’re condoning that behavior. You’re saying that it’s okay for someone to keep behaving badly by not dealing with it. Leaders especially have to understand the impact that this has on the culture overall. I remember a nurse once saying to me, “There’s nothing worse than working with a brilliant clinician who is a complete jerk.” It’s so true. And yet it happens way too often—we tolerate behavior that breaks down our culture and erodes mutual care and trust in the workplace.

To all team members, the message is to bring the best version of yourself to work. Being compassionate and understanding of other people, having a charitable assumption, showing your own humanity, and being willing to be a little vulnerable to connect with others goes a long way in creating a great place to work. Each person contributes to—or undermines—the quality of the workplace. So, the question is: who will you be when you come to work today?

ACCCBuzz: What can attendees expect from your presentation? What is the value of attending in person?

Dr. Salgado: When I am with a group and I ask them, “Would you rather be watching this online?” I have never had someone say, “Yeah, I really wish I was back in my office by myself, sitting in front of my computer and tempted to keep checking my email.” I truly believe there’s enormous value in being together: the camaraderie it creates and the therapeutic connection of being with other people.

In my particular keynote, I believe that most people in my audiences pretty much know the things I’m talking about. It’s not like I’m telling them something brand new that they’ve never heard before. But there’s a context for this and a framework that can help in thinking about how to be intentionally aware of your culture, of your own behaviors, of your role in that culture, and of how you can create a better workplace. Sometimes I think the best self-care is caring for ourselves within the context of a team—being part of something bigger than ourselves and really striving for the impact that people in this field have on others’ lives.

Register now to hear from Susan Salgado live and in-person this October at the 42nd National Oncology Conference in Denver, Colorado.