WEDNESDAY - JULY 21, 2026

HUMPDAY

Weekly Insight & Inspiration for Purposeful Leaders

THIS WEEK’S FOCUS

Leading Change Without Losing Your Team

How to earn real buy-in, manage the pace of change, and keep your team engaged in an era when healthcare is being reshaped faster than most units can absorb it.

People don’t resist change. They resist being changed without being consulted.

Insignificant. This is the word used by a charge nurse I recently visited with when she described the change happening in her organization. “We, as charge nurses are closest to the patient and the care delivered to them, yet no one asks our opinion or involves us in how change should happen. We are basically insignificant.” She made it clear that she and her fellow colleagues understand that change must happen and they want to support the organization they have so much invested in, but no one ever asks them. Initiatives are rolled out - mostly unsuccessfully - and everyone blames the “front line” for not having buy-in when it fails. It was a crushing conversation for me to have. Everyone should have a say in their work environment - or at least an understanding of why it is changing.

The Environment Has Changed the Job

Healthcare leadership has always meant managing change - new protocols, new regulations, and new staffing models. But the pace has shifted. AI-enabled documentation tools, predictive staffing algorithms, virtual nursing platforms, and clinical decision -support systems are arriving on units faster than most people can fully absorb them, let alone master them.

For your team, this doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like ground that keeps moving. And when the ground keeps moving, people don’t lean in - they brace.

Your job is no longer just to manage change. It is to manage the experience of change for the people living through it.

That distinction matters. A rollout can be technically sound and still fail - not because the tool was wrong, but because the people asked to use it never felt like partners in the decision.

Buy-In is Built, Not Announced

Buy-in doesn’t happen in the all-staff email announcing a new system go-live. It happens - or doesn’t - in the months and weeks before, in a hundred small moments where your team decides whether this change is being done with them or to them. Consider what actually builds genuine buy-in:

• Naming the why before the what - explaining the problem the change is solving, not just the steps to execute it.

• Inviting your most skeptical team members into the conversation early, not just your natural early adopters.

• Being honest about what will get harder before it gets easier, instead of only selling the upside.

Healthcare will keep changing, often driven by technology your team didn’t ask for and won’t fully understand at first. You cannot promise them a stable environment. What you can promise is a leader who brings them into the change early, tells them the truth about the trade-offs, and treats their concerns as information to address rather than resistance to be managed.

Support is a Two-Way Street

Change is especially difficult for teams when they have sought to change a process or protocol to improve their work flows and their ask for change falls on deaf ears. There’s nothing more frustrating than asking for help and being ignored. It is hard for front line teams when they recognize a need for change and the only change that takes place is in areas no one asked them about meanwhile, they are left to deal with processes that don’t work for them. Be sure that, as the leader, you have regular forums that ask for feedback about what isn’t working and what needs to change - and then do something with it! This way when you have to deliver the hard message of change, your team trusts that you will not only listen to them, but you have their backs.

PRACTICES FOR LEADING CHANGE

1. Lead with the why. Before any rollout, explain the problem being solved in language your team already recognizes from their daily work - not just the new steps they’ll follow.

2. Recruit your skeptics. Bring your most cautious team members into the planning conversation early. Their objections, addressed up front, often become your strongest implementation insights.

3. Close every feedback loop. When you ask for input, report back what changed as a result - or explain why it didn’t. Silence after a survey is what teaches people that feedback is not welcome.

4. Encourage change from within. Allow your team to initiate change in their department when needed. Change should not always be a C-suite initiative. Re-enforce that change - when managed well - is part of a healthy work environment.

A Final Thought

AI and rapid technological change are not going to slow down in healthcare - if anything, nursing and clinical care will keep sitting at the center of that acceleration. The leaders whose teams come through this well won’t be the ones with the smoothest rollouts. They’ll be the ones who kept their people informed, involved, and reassured that their opinions matter most even as the tools around them keep changing.

Change moves fast. Trust moves at the speed of how you lead through it.

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This week take the time to ask your team what they think needs changing in their department. Ask what could change that would make their jobs less cumbersome. Really listen. Then empower them to identify, manage and rollout change that they find meaningful.

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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!