Our Core Values

We’re building our group to support the Hutch’s data community and beyond. Our core values define how we work together and guide our efforts. These principles have grown out of our experience in open science and our belief that people thrive when they feel valued, trusted, and supported. If we create an environment where everyone can excel, we’ll accomplish incredible things.

As with everything we do, we are making our core values open and we welcome feedback on these values to ensure they reflect how we work and how we contribute to the Fred Hutch data community.

How we treat each other

Be kind. Kindness is key. We strive to offer each other grace, empathy and respect and work together through difficulties, even in tough conversations or working to solve hard problems. This means communicating respectfully, exihibiting patience, appreciating effort and a focus on psychological safety.

We trust you. We hire people because we value their expertise and trust them to make decisions aligned with our common vision and goals. You don’t need to ask or wait for permission for every step, but we trust you to ensure you are including others when your decisions affect them or a community.

We take care of our people. It is important to us that you have opportunities for career progression, learning, and can do work you find meaningful. We want you to have opportunities to develop new skills, take on challenging projects, and create work products that you can be proud of. Of course, we would like to have you on the team as long as possible, but if you find a great opportunity elsewhere, we will cheer you on and help you move into your next role.

Give each other permission to be human. We understand that life doesn’t stop when you’re at work. Yes, there are requirements around time off and there is still a lot of flexibility that you and your colleagues can make work in our hybrid team with a little planning and communication. Most importantly, take care of yourself: stay home when you are sick, go to doctor’s appointments, take that fitness class, get a green juice, take a hike. Take care of others: pick your children up from school, volunteer to chaperone their field trip, be an amazing caregiver for a relative. Take time off: go see the world, take time to visit relatives, or have a stay-cation.

How we work

When we treat each other well and provide people support to do impactful work, we can accomplish a lot together!

Build things that will help people. Our Guiding Principles drive what we choose to focus on and inform how we make it happen. Sometimes that is helping people directly with training, community events, documentation or Data House Calls. Sometimes it is indirectly by building resources, software, infrastructure or processes that will help others. Our goal is to maximize our impact by enabling others.

Ship as soon as you can. Our success hinges on sharing drafts, prototypes, and ideas as soon as they can start to be useful for others. A rough draft shared widely holds far more value than a polished manuscript hidden on your desktop. By embracing the “work in the open” philosophy inspired by David Robinson’s model for understanding value, we maximize our opportunity for feedback, collaboration, and progress. The sooner we share, the sooner we improve—and the closer we get to meaningful impact.

Seek feedback and revise! If you are on our team then part of the reason we hired you is that you are an opinionated specialist: you have good reasons to believe what you believe. However, we also aspire to hire people with wide-ranging areas of expertise and often work products improve the more brains and perspectives are applied to them. The best work emerges when multiple brains contribute, so baking in seeking constructive feedback through collaboration is key. Be open to listening, learning, and incorporating input from teammates and external collaborators alike. Given our fast-paced approach, seeking feedback and iterating frequently will be essential to refining and improving our work.

Can we move faster? When we are having a conversation about working on a project, be prepared to field the question: “Can we do this faster?”. We acknowledge that speed comes with certain types of costs, so be prepared to outline different ways we could accelerate a project and what each of those possibilities would cost – financial, risk, quality or otherwise. Our preference is to deliver something valuable quickly so we can iterate rather than aiming for what we think today might be perfection at a slower pace. However, we always prioritize compliance with laws, ethics, and regulations, ensuring that when caution is required, we proceed thoughtfully and carefully.

Document, document, document If you’ve learned something new, made a decision that could affect others, or figured out a solution to a problem — document it! What seems simple or obvious to you now might not be for someone else, or even for your future self. We prioritize written communication and information sharing because it ensures clarity, enables shared understanding, builds trust and empowers everyone to stay informed and keep learning. When in doubt, write it down and share it!

Be generous with credit. Acknowledgement is not a zero sum game - credit should be given generously, as widely as possible, and as liberally as is feasible. At the same time, mistakes will happen, and our focus should be on learning from them and finding solutions, not blame. Credit and acknowledgement should flow strongly down the org chart and if consequences of mistakes happen the responsibility for addressing them should flow up to the top, stopping with the Chief Data Officer.

Remember that respecting others and being kind means when groups we collaborate with have different cultures than ours, we will adapt to respect those differences while striving to stay true to our goals about how we work. Wherever possible we will advocate for these values with other groups as well!