Doing what the staff wants (or not) — “If I had given customers what they thought they wanted, I would have invented a faster horse.” -Henry Ford, Inventor of the automobile There is a specific characteristic of a pharmacy leader that is hard to define. It is the ability to hear the various arrows of feedback coming from…

The pain of re-work — You return home from a three-week trip exhausted. You have been eating in restaurants, used random pillows and are wrestling with a two-hour time change. You jammed clothes, dress shoes, a few hundred dollars of souvenir gifts along with your tablet into your checked luggage and boarded a plane for…

The Desirable Staff Personality Trifecta — It has been said that drafting an NFL quarterback is a crapshoot. There are simply too many variables to predict that scouts and managers can foresee. If they find that hard, they should try selecting great pharmacy staff out of the candidates available to us! What if there were three…

3 ways your pharmacy can fail — Pharmacy is a little like jumping out of an airplane. It takes bravery, practice, training and most of all, a parachute. While the primary parachute is obvious, there is another essential need before jumping out of the plane: the back-up chute. The back-up…

Betting your chips where they pay you the most — Easy question: what do you make per hour? Some bets in life are simple once you wrap your mind around them. For years, my wife and I resisted paying someone to cut our lawn. Despite the insane schedule that comes with being connected to a few pharmacies, triathlon training and everything that two children bring our way, I…

Know the difference between your training and racing brain — Over the course of a season, a triathlete will undergo countless workout sessions of varying demands with the lake, pool, track, trail, road and bike. We will go slow, do sprints, and find hill repeats with high-intensity intervals. While we will push ourselves, it is difficult to mimic race day. …

Flexibly navigating the unknown — In Adam Grant’s book Think Again, he challenges us to rethink our old ways. His research shows an interesting find that is relevant to pharmacy. As seen in his figure above, as we gain knowledge we must maintain our humility to find a new sweet spot of performance and decision-making…

A template exercise for pharmacists — At pharmacyU Vancouver last fall, I told a story about my own burnout lessons from mistakes of work-life balance (sample recording here). It involved shingles and being hospitalized for mono with our second baby on the way but also came with a happy conclusion. What I learned about work-life balance…

The seven characteristics of ideal pharmacy leaders — There is a line that has stuck with me from when I was a pharmacy student: onto paper and out of your head. It means that writing down our thoughts allows us to press the pause button on stress and return to it with a fresh mindset the next day…