It’s Humpday!

WEDNESDAY - October 14, 2026

HUMPDAY

Weekly Insight & Inspiration for Purposeful Leaders

THIS WEEK’S FOCUS

Leading Beyond the Fire

How to move from reacting to daily chaos to building the team and the department your future needs.

If every day is an emergency, you’re not leading toward the future. You’re only reacting to the present.

Here is something most people don’t realize about firefighters… fighting fires is a small part of the job. Most of their time goes into what happens before the alarm. They train. They inspect buildings. They walk through hospitals, schools and high-rise buildings so that when the call comes, they already know where the elevators, stairwells and standpipes are. The best fire departments don’t just measure success by how quickly they can put out a fire. The real success measure is how many fires never start.

How do you lead? Does the scenario below look familiar?

The day starts with a sick call. By 7:15 you are reworking assignments. By 9:00 there is a family complaint, a piece of broken equipment, a throughput crisis, and an e-mail from someone in administration that needs an answer by noon. You go home exhausted, having put out at least a hundred fires. Somewhere on the drive home you realize that none of the problems you solved moved your team any closer to where it needs to be a year from now.

This is not a leadership flaw. It is the default setting of healthcare leadership today. For nurse leaders specifically, this feels like a “normal” day. Many of us came up at the bedside where responding quickly with clinical expertise was the job. We were rewarded for being the calm one managing the code, the person who could handle the most complex patient that came through the door, the clinical expert with all the immediate answers. Then we were promoted and no one told us that the skill that made us great clinicians could quietly keep us from becoming great leaders.

Firefighting is seductive because it feels productive. It is visible, it has a clear ending and people typically thank you for it. Strategy is slow, quiet and uncertain. No one thanks you for the problem that never happened. But a leader who only reacts, builds a team that only reacts. Staff learn to bring every problem to you. The same fires keep coming back because no one has the time to ask why they started. Days of firefighting turn into weeks and months. The future arrives in the form of new service lines, a technology rollout, or a shift in patient population and your team meets all of it unprepared.

Putting out fires is part of the job, but it cannot be the whole job.

A Growth Mindset Asks a Different Question

Most of us think of a growth mindset as a personal trait. For a leader it is bigger than that. It is the belief that your people, your team, and your department are capable of becoming more than they are today, and the willingness to take the responsibility of leading them there.

A leader stuck in survival mode asks, “How do we get through this week?”. A leader with a growth mindset asks that question too, and then asks a second one, “Who do we need to become as a team?”

That second question has three layers:

Your individuals. Who on your team is ready for more? What will each person need to know in one to two years that they don’t know today? Who should be precepting, taking charge, pursuing certification or climbing the clinical ladder?
Your team. What do you need to do better together? Handoffs, communication, how you welcome new hires and graduates, how you treat each other during the hardest shifts.
Your department. Where is your service going? Have there been changes in volume, patient mix, technology, or community need? What will be asked of your department that it isn’t ready for yet?

Firefighting never answers any of these questions. Planning does.

Start With Where Your Organization Is Going

A department plan that isn’t connected to the organization’s plan is just a wish list. Despite this, many managers and directors have never read their organization’s strategic plan closely. They have only seen it on a slide at an annual meeting and moved on.

Alignment starts with understanding:

Get the plan and read it as if it was written about you and your department. If you don’t have it, ask your leader for it. Look for the pillars: growth, quality, people, finance, community. Every one of them touches your department in some way.
Ask how your department contributes. A simple question to your leader opens the door. “If we succeed at this plan three years from now, what should look different on my unit?”
Translate it for your team. “Expanding cardiovascular services” is abstract and hard for your bedside team to relate to. “Adding TAVR’s and WATCHMAN procedures” makes it easier for your team to understand that there will be a need for new competencies and skill mix. This is something they can plan for.
Build line of sight. Every person on your team should be able to connect the work they do every shift to something the organization is trying to achieve.

Alignment works in your favor. When your requests for staff, equipment, or education tie directly to an organizational priority, they become far easier for senior leaders to say yes to.

Build the Plan With Your Team, Not For Them

A plan written in your office and simply handed down will only earn compliance at best. A plan built with your team earns ownership. Your team has information you don’t. They know exactly where the fires start because they deal with them every shift. Here’s a practical way to build the plan together:

Share the bigger picture. Bring the organization’s priorities to a staff meeting or practice council in plain language. Explain what the plans mean for your department and why they matter.
Ask the questions that matter. What are we proud of? What gets in the way of care every day? Which problems keep coming back? If we were the best version of ourselves two years from now, what would be different? Be sure to gather answers from every skill and shift through multiple listening posts.
Find themes and choose three, not twelve! Three priorities your team can name from memory. A plan no one can remember is a plan that will surely fail.
Give every priority a face. Ask one of your team members to champion each priority with you as the sponsor. When the people doing the work lead the change, the change sticks.
Keep it visible and revisit often. Post progress where it can be seen by all. Update at huddles. Celebrate milestones. A plan in a binder dies in the binder.

When people help build the future, they stop seeing it as your plan and start seeing it as theirs.

Make Room for the Future

None of this works if every hour of your day is already spoken for. Making space for strategic thinking is a discipline and it rarely happens by accident.

Treat recurring fires as design problems. If you have to put out the same fire three times, it is no longer an emergency. It is a broken process asking to be fixed. Hand it to a small group of staff as an improvement project and give them the authority to solve it.
Delegate the fire, not just the task. Equip your charge nurses and supervisors to make the call without you. Every problem they solve on their own frees your time and builds the next generation of leaders.
Put the future on the calendar. Block one protected hour each week for thinking, planning, and reviewing progress on your priorities. Guard it the way you would guard a meeting with your president/CEO.
Measure what you are building, not just what you survived. Alongside your daily operational metrics, track progress on your three priorities. What you measure is what your team believes matters.

3 PRACTICES FOR LEADING BEYOND THE FIRE

Read the plan above you. Find your organization’s strategic plan and identify the two or three priorities where your department has the most influence. Ask your leader how they see your team contributing.
Ask your team the future question. At your next huddle or staff meeting ask, “If we were at our best two years from now what would be different?” Write down every answer. That’s the beginning of your plan.
Fix one fire for good. Choose the problem that keeps coming back and turn it into a team project with an owner, a deadline and your full support.

A Final Thought

The fires will always come. Healthcare will never run out of urgent problems, and your team will always need you to show up when things go sideways. The most effective leaders are not the ones who can only handle a crisis well. They are the ones who looked up long enough to see where the team needed to go, chartered a path to get there, and took everyone along with them.

Putting out fires only maintains the status quo at best. Your team, your organization and your community need you to build a plan for the future.

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This week find your organization’s strategic plan and read it with your department in mind. Then ask your team the “if we were at our best in two years…” question. Listen to every answer and build your strategic plan.

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I’d love to hear from you. Please reach out and share if you found this insight helpful, if you’d like to talk about it more, or if there’s a topic you’d like to see in a future Humpday. Stacie@LumisLeadership.com

~ Stacie

Previous Humpday’s can be found in the Newsletter Library at www.LumisLeadership.com

The “Humpday” was an e-mail originally created by a great leader and mentor - Marc Strode. He used the Humpday to bring insight and inspiration to his team every week. With his permission and at his request to Keep the Spirit - the Humpday lives on. Marc, thank you for being a leader worth following. Despite your love for camels, you truly are the GOAT!