Any working person with cancer is forced to weigh the risks and benefits of sharing deeply personal news in the workplace, often before you can know what the diagnosis will mean. For those in leadership positions, that decision can be further complicated by a sense of responsibility for the many people who rely on you.
“There’s something about cancer that creates fear in anyone who happens to be in the perimeter,” says Gina Jacobson, the executive director of Working with Cancer, and a seven-year survivor of stage 4 colon cancer.
That fear, for some managers, is the reason to keep a diagnosis private, while for others it’s a call to be as open as possible with their teams. Either way, it’s a decision that evolves alongside the realities of working — and leading — with cancer. It can mean reassessing what it means to be successful, even what it means to be a “good boss.”
“I always remind people that just because you decide to disclose a cancer diagnosis, it doesn’t mean you have to disclose everything — it’s still your story,” says Hadley Maya, a social worker at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) who counsels many cancer patients in their 30s to 50s, when identity and career can be closely entwined.
According to the latest Cancer Facts and Figures from the American Cancer Society, more people are living with cancer than at any point in history — some 18.6 million Americans, the vast majority in their prime working years.
Sharing a Cancer Diagnosis With Your Team
“I thought I knew how I would approach and attack everything,” says Jacobson, who was the chief growth officer for the media company Starcom when she was diagnosed, at 45, with metastatic colon cancer. “I thought I could achieve my way through cancer and announced my plan the way I would present a business strategy. Then I got into the reality of treatment and realized I was not qualified to be making the kind of pronouncements that I made at the beginning.”
Jacobson says she never considered keeping the news — or even the details — of her diagnosis and treatment from the people on her team. She says her instinct to share freely arose in part from the “very safe and supportive environment” that the CEO, her boss at the time, had cultivated. In fact, when Jacobson complained of feeling unusually tired — symptoms she’d written off to a demanding job and parenting young kids — it was her boss who encouraged her to make a doctor’s appointment.
While in treatment, Jacobson attended a leadership retreat, where everyone was invited to share personal insights following a guided meditation. “I found myself breaking down in front of 30 of the most senior leaders at the organization, a number of whom reported to me,” Jacobson recalls. “Afterward, I had several people come up and say, ‘It’s such a relief to be able to see what you’re feeling.’”
While Jacobson says her instinct has always been toward openness, she learned that “sharing indiscriminately” created other burdens down the road — not everyone has the capacity to give support in the way you may need it.
“It all comes down to discerning your audience,” she says, “discerning the relationship that you have with a manager or with your team.” Over time, she says, she learned to share “not all of the details, but enough context.”
Maintaining Your Privacy at Work
Ken Cooper, the head of global HR for Bloomberg, was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a slow-growing form of blood cancer, in 2009. He chose to keep the news “very private,” even as he began immunotherapy in 2018 and participated in a clinical trial at MSK. He says that early on, he didn’t see the value in telling employees about his diagnosis when so many others were facing more aggressive cancers and suffering the side effects of chemotherapy.
“What I was going through was no big deal,” Cooper says, “and I didn’t want my team getting concerned.”
His perspective changed, however, in 2021, when he and his wife went to the NYC Marathon to cheer on a Bloomberg employee who was running with Fred’s Team, MSK’s official running program, which has raised more than $130 million for cancer research since 1995. “At the time, I couldn’t imagine running more than five miles, and certainly never a marathon,” says Cooper. “But I turned to my wife and said, ‘I’m gonna do this — once.’ ”
His first marathon — dedicated to Bloomberg employees being treated at MSK — was such a success, he decided to keep running. He now dedicates his marathons to Bloomberg employees and their family members who are facing cancer anywhere in the world — Bloomberg’s 26,000-plus people work in more than 190 countries. Cooper and the Bloomberg team have raised more than $2 million for cancer research at MSK, with the goal this year of surpassing $2.5 million.
For Cooper, fulfilling his mission of raising money for cancer research ultimately meant going very public: “I decided, all right, I’ll share my story too, for what it’s worth.” He now makes himself available to any Bloomberg employee who wants to talk about their own cancer diagnosis or their experiences as a caregiver — his wife was treated for breast cancer six years ago, so he says he can relate to both sides of the experience. “I’ve become Mr. Cancer at work — in my role as head of HR, if someone gets diagnosed, they will often come to me first.”
The Power of Asking for Help When You’re in Charge
“Having cancer is a brutal lesson in delegation,” says Jacobson. “I found myself unable to cover every single meeting or every single project.” She soon realized that she’d have to be significantly more selective about where she applied her limited energies, and remembered that what had always driven her business success was recognizing potential — in the context of cancer treatment, that meant focusing less on what she could achieve day to day and more on awakening hope and drive in the people on her team.
“It took me years to learn that lesson completely,” says Jacobson. “But the last year I spent in treatment was the most successful professional year of my career — and I credit that largely to the fact that I was able to let go. I had the best year of my professional life, and my direct reports also each had the best year of their professional lives.”
Jacobson has written extensively about her experiences with cancer and has reflected on what leaders gain from asking for help — a shift in perspective that may not come easily to those who’ve long identified as competitive and high-achieving.
“When you ask your team for help, you benefit — but it helps the helper most of all. Asking for help builds strength for both parties,” Jacobson says. “Everyone’s going to be in a situation I’ll call a cancer-like situation, sooner or later. It might be cancer or divorce or infertility or the death of a loved one. I wish we could get past that stigma against asking for help.”
Changing the Culture From the Top
Untangling work from identity after a cancer diagnosis can be a long and difficult process. Both Cooper and Jacobson say it’s taken years for them to find meaning in having cancer and to connect that meaning to their professional lives.
In 2023, after nearly 30 years at Starcom, Jacobson joined Publicis Groupe, where she leads their Working with Cancer initiative, a global effort to normalize cancer in the workplace by asking organizations to pledge support and resources to employees with cancer. More than 4,000 organizations have signed the pledge (MSK is a founding partner).
“There’s this idea that cancer comes crashing in and forces you to face mortality,” says Jacobson, “and you say, ‘Oh gosh, I shouldn’t be spending this many hours at work — I should be spending more time with the people I love.’ It’s more complicated than that.”
In a recent survey from the Harris Poll conducted by Cancer and Careers, 75% of cancer patients and survivors reported that working through treatment had helped them to cope — 68% said that support at work had a positive impact on their health.
Bloomberg started offering cancer benefits in 2020 through MSK Direct, a program that expedites access to the highest-quality care by connecting employees and their family members directly with experts at MSK. MSK Direct is one of the nation’s largest employer cancer benefits programs, offered by more nearly 400 employers and unions.
“It may seem like a small thing, but it’s not a small thing,” says Cooper. “It means that when an employee is diagnosed with cancer — or someone in their family is diagnosed — and they come to me, and say, ‘What do I do?,’ I can say, ‘Call this number, the MSK Direct line, and someone will be there to help you.’”
How Working With Cancer Can Strengthen Leadership Skills
When you have cancer, says Jacobson, you have the opportunity to observe many different, deeply human reactions to fear — from trying to lean in and control cancer to cursing everything from the cosmos to their doctors. “When you see these reactions and behaviors play out around cancer, it gets much easier to recognize the same patterns in business.”
It’s affirmed her belief that good leadership always comes back to identifying who’s afraid of what and helping people to manage that uncertainty. “Mortality fear is fear with a big F, but there’s also fear with the little f — fear of meeting a quota or disappointing a client, all of these little factors and decisions that impact relationships and ultimately performance.”
Deciding how much to disclose about a cancer diagnosis at work is deeply individual — it isn’t one tough decision but many, as audiences and circumstances change. For bosses, it can mean making counterintuitive leadership moves, such as sharing the personal, acknowledging fear, asking for help, and letting go through delegation. For Cooper and Jacobson, those professional adaptations, made under extraordinary personal pressure, have also led to greater success, not just for themselves but for the many people who look to them for guidance and inspiration.