It’s Humpday!

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 24, 2026

HUMPDAY

Weekly Insight & Inspiration for Purposeful Leaders

THIS WEEK’S FOCUS

Rounding With Purpose

Why one-on-one rounding may be the highest-leverage hour on your calendar - for your patients, your people and your unit

Providing great patient care has always been a high priority for me. I worked hard to become the best ER/Trauma nurse possible - certifications, research - the whole shabang! That said - I wasn’t always the best employee. Typically - if I was in my manager’s office it was probably because of some rude comment I made to another department. Until I worked for Dan. Dan was initially my night shift charge nurse when I first started working at a big trauma center in Colorado. Eventually Dan promoted to manager. I still remember when I got my first request from Dan to meet him in his office. “Oh great” I thought, “now who did I piss off?”

Much to my surprise I wasn’t in trouble. Dan simply wanted to “get to know me better”. Odd, I thought, as Dan and I had worked together for some time before he promoted but it made sense that as the new manager, he would want to meet with all the staff individually. And then the next month came - and another request to meet with him one-on-one. This time he asked for my thoughts on some new initiatives and how teamwork was with our physician group and how he could better support me. I was at a loss for words. No one had ever asked what I thought about my work, how it was done and what could be better for my team. This became a regular, monthly occurrence. Dan would bring us all in one-on-one and ask for our feedback on our work and how he could better support us. The best part - he actually followed through on the requests we made.

If you could peruse my HR record you would see that about this time I stopped letting my mouth get me into trouble and I actually never had another behavior counseling session again. Additionally - the culture of our ER became out-of-this-world! We became a tight, high functioning team that well exceeded all of our quality and safety metrics. It was hands-down the best bedside job I’ve ever had - all because of a monthly round.

Rounding without follow-through isn’t connection - it’s a survey your team quietly stops answering. Closing the loop is where the trust is built.

Some of the most important work you do as a leader will never appear on a dashboard. It happens in the few minutes you spend, one-on-one, asking a caregiver how they’re really doing - and then doing something with what you hear.

We call it rounding, but the word undersells it. Done well, a one-on-one round is not a hallway pleasantry or a box on a manager’s checklist. It is a deliberate, recurring conversation in which you learn what’s working, what’s breaking, and what your team needs straight from the people closest to the patient.

The return on that conversation is far bigger than most leaders realize.

Three Returns on a Single Conversation

When you round consistently and well, three things move at once, and they just happen to be the three things every healthcare leader is measured on.

Patient outcomes. The caregiver at the bedside sees the near-miss before it becomes an event, the supply that’s chronically missing, the workflow that quietly adds risk. Rounding surfaces those signals while there’s still time to act on them. When your team trusts that you’ll listen, they tell you what they see and safer care follows.
Caregiver retention. People rarely leave over one big thing. They leave because of a hundred small, unheard things that added up. Regular one-on-one rounding catches those things early, while they’re still solvable. A caregiver who feels genuinely seen by their leader is far harder to recruit away.
Unit culture. Rounding sets the tone for how communication flows. When the team members watch their leader ask honest questions and then act on the answers, they learn that this is a place where speaking up is worth it. That single belief of “what I say here matters” is the foundation of every healthy work environment.

Rounding That Doesn’t Feel Like a Survey

The fastest way to ruin rounding is to make it feel like a transaction. If your questions sound rehearsed and you allow your attention to be shifted away by texts or e-mails, your team will pick up on your lack of genuine interest and give you surface-level answers. You will have wasted their and your time.

Be fully there. Put the phone away. Two genuine minutes of attention beat ten distracted ones.
Ask open, specific questions. “How are things?” invites “Fine”. Instead ask, “what’s the most frustrating part of your shift right now?” This invites truth.
Listen more than you talk. Resist the urge to explain, defend, or solve in the moment. Your only job in the round is to listen and understand.
Ask what is working. Rounding is not just problem hunting. Ask who deserves recognition and what the department should keep doing. You will learn what your team values.
Take notes that you will actually refer to. What you capture is what you’re able to follow up on.

The goal isn’t to get through your list of people. It is to make each person feel as if they were the only one on it.

Follow-Through Is the Whole Point

Here is the part that decides whether rounding builds trust or quietly erodes it: what you do after the conversation ends. When a caregiver shares something with you - a frustration or an idea - they are extending you a small act of trust. If nothing visibly happens, that trust begins to erode. Rounding without closing the loop is worse than not rounding at all. It teaches your team that you ask but don’t actually act.

Closing the loop doesn’t mean solving anything. It means responding purposefully to everything.

Acknowledge it. Even “I heard you and here’s what I’m doing about it” is a closed loop.
Act where you can and say so. Connect the change back to the person who raised it: “you mentioned the supply issue, here’s what’s changed.”
Be honest about what you can and can’t fix. “I can’t change that and here’s why” shows more respect that silence ever will.
Make the follow up visible. Loop closure that happens only in private doesn’t build culture. Share wins from rounding with the whole team.

…..But I Don’t Have Time!

The most common reason leaders don’t round is the most honest one: there’s no time. Rounding doesn’t require a free calendar, it requires a protected one.

Block it like a meeting. Put rounding on your calendar as a recurring, non-negotiable appointment and don’t bend when someone (even your boss) asks for that time.
Round in small batches. You don’t need to see everyone in one sitting. Two or three intentional conversations a day works.
Meet people where they are. Don’t make this inconvenient for them. Ask your team where they would prefer to meet to respect their workflow.
Protect quality over quantity. A handful of real conversations will teach you more than a bunch of rushed ones.
Keep a running list. Track who you’ve met with and what came up so each conversation builds on the last one

A Final Thought

Rounding is how you find out what your people - and your patients - need. Closing the loop is how you prove you were listening.

Your presence tells your team you care. Your follow-through proves it.

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This week round on three caregivers with one honest question each. Before the week’s end, close the loop on at least one thing you heard. Go back and tell them what you did with what they said.

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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

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!