It’s Humpday!

WEDNESDAY - September 16, 2026

HUMPDAY

Weekly Insight & Inspiration for Purposeful Leaders

THIS WEEK’S FOCUS

Meeting Toxicity Where It’s At

Leading through a toxic culture looks different depending on whether it’s the team you lead, those you lead with, or those that lead you. Staying true to what’s right never changes.

You cannot always fix the culture you’re standing in. You can always decide what you refuse to let pass through you and land on your team.

Every leader eventually meets toxicity in one of three positions. Sometimes it’s in your own unit, showing up in a team member whose behavior is quietly poisoning morale, and it’s yours to manage out. Sometimes it’s a peer, someone with equal footing to you, and you have no authority to formally address it, only to manage your response. And sometimes, the hardest version, it’s above you. It’s your director, your leadership team, the culture at the top that sets the tone for everyone beneath it, and you’re left absorbing what you didn’t create and unilaterally cannot change.

Toxicity in work environments doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. Where the toxicity sits determines what tools you need to use. What doesn’t change is your role in protecting your team, your integrity and what you stand for.

When You are the One Who Has to Manage it Out

This is the version leaders often fear most, and ironically, the one where you have the most oversight to act. When toxicity lives on your own team, staying positive does not mean staying quiet. Tolerating disruptive behavior in the name of keeping the peace is not kindness. It’s abdication and your team knows it. They are watching to see whether you will protect the culture or protect your own comfort.

Name the behavior specifically and early before it hardens into “that’s just how that person is.” Blanket statements at staff meetings like, “everyone should be kind” changes nothing. Specific, individual, documented behavior-based feedback does. Partner with HR early and hold the standard consistently regardless of how skilled or tenured the person is. Clinical competence has never been a license for cruelty in the workplace.

Protect your team while the process plays out. They should not have to absorb months of toxic behavior while you quietly work a performance plan. Rounding, transparency about what you can appropriately share, and visible advocacy for those affected all matter. Staying positive as the leader doing this work means holding hope for what your culture can become while refusing to pretend the current moment is fine.

When it’s a Peer, Not Someone You Manage

This is where leaders most often feel stuck because the authority you’d use with your own team simply doesn’t exist here. You cannot performance-manage a colleague. What you can do is manage your exposure, your response, and your own sphere of influence.

Start by controlling what is allowed in the rooms you lead. You do not have to allow someone else’s toxicity a platform in your meetings, your huddles or your unit, even if you can’t control it in theirs. If a peer consistently undermines you or your team, address it directly and privately first, in specific, unemotional terms before escalating it. Many peer conflicts never get a direct conversation. They go straight to the boss and that only compounds the issue.

Protect your team from the fallout. If a peer’s dysfunction regularly spills onto your unit, your job is to be the buffer, not the megaphone. Know the difference between something worth a direct conversation and something that needs to go to your own leadership as a pattern, not a complaint. One frustrating interaction warrants a conversation. A repeated pattern that affects patient care, staff retention or safety should be documented and appropriately escalated. Staying positive here doesn’t mean accepting the situation silently. It means refusing to let someone else’s behavior recruit you into becoming reactive, gossiping or unkind yourself.

When the Toxicity Sits Above You

This is the position with the least direct control and the highest stakes because the tone your leadership sets doesn’t stay contained. It moves downhill, whether you want it to or not. Your job, uncomfortable as it is, becomes filtration. What lands on you does not automatically get to land on your team.

That means absorbing pressure without passing it down as panic. It means translating an unkind directive into something workable for your team without pretending the directive was reasonable if it wasn’t. It means choosing your battles with real discernment; which issues are worth the political capital of pushing back and which are simply not the hill to die on today. Document patterns, not just incidents, because a single bad meeting is forgettable, but objective evidence (not opinions) is what drives accountability.

Give yourself permission to acknowledge the hard reality that sometimes toxicity in your leadership does not change no matter how well you try to manage and filter it or how much grace you choose to extend. Protecting your own well-being by setting boundaries, leaning on a mentor or coach, or eventually deciding to leave a toxic culture is not disloyalty. It’s what allows you to keep leading well for as long as you choose to stay and leave with integrity if that should become the healthiest option for you.

3 PRACTICES FOR LEADING IN A TOXIC ENVIRONMENT

Name it precisely, not vaguely. Whether it’s a direct report, a peer, or your leadership, specific and factual naming of a behavior is what creates change. Vague discomfort changes nothing.
Decide what passes through you. You cannot always stop toxicity at its source. You can always decide what you allow to travel through you and reach your team. Be the filter, not the conduit.
Protect your own reserves on purpose. Have an honest conversation with a trusted mentor or peer outside the situation. Staying positive under pressure is not a personality trait. It’s a practice that requires support.

A Final Thought

You don’t get to choose where toxicity shows up in your career, whether on your team, in one of your peers or in your boss. Chances are, if you work long enough, at some point it will show up in all three. What you do get to choose is what you do when it does, and whether you let it change who you are in the process.

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This week, get honest about where the toxicity closest to you is really coming from and take one action that fits that position. Address it directly, contain it, or protect against it. Then protect your own well-being while you do.

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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!