Recognizing who you need to keep tabs on — The babysitter is a relatively simple job: monitor the situation so nothing gets out of hand. Ever find yourself working harder than you need to in the process of buying something for your pharmacy? …

Resisting change for the sake of it — What you resist launching, waiving or spending money on makes a real difference. In a repetitive pharmacy world that craves constant peaks of new-ness, those with the ability to grind will out-succeed those that make impulse decisions and routinely make big pharmacy system changes. …

Managing risk by doing half the job — Ship builders construct a ship’s hull into compartments. Analogous to separate rooms within a house, the hull is composed of adjacent smaller sections. This way, damage to a piece of the hull would flood only one or more compartments, maintaining the ship’s overall buoyancy. Compartmentalization permits risk management. Viewing…

A true story about pharmacy staff turnover — No matter how great the pharmacy team, stuff happens. Great teams cannot prepare for everything, but their true strength comes forward in how they respond to challenge. Earlier in my career, our pharmacy team underwent vast staff turnover. On a team of twenty, we lost eight workers in six months…

Managing our mental queue — “I think I have a bladder infection, can I book an appointment?” “Sure, he’ll see you in 5 months.” As we are handed the privilege of more clinical responsibility, pharmacists need to grow in our ability to manage our queue. …

Managing the blend of personalities on the team — One job of the pharmacy leader is to moderate the range of personalities on the team. Once the right people are involved, everyone’s opinion is valid and part of the process of arriving at the best decisions, but only if everyone is allowed to speak. Great pharmacy leaders can moderate…

Being memorable to your patient — As a child, Anna and her family would regularly take a picnic to the park and have lunch together on a blanket in the sun. They had no TV, no cell phones and only each other for amusement. They played games, shared stories and made plans. One particularly happy memory…

Setting up your pharmacy team mates for success — Wayne Douglas Gretzky from Brantford, Ontario is more than a retired pro hockey player. Nicknamed “The Great One”, he is the game’s all-time highest goals producer, winner of multiple Stanley Cups, international gold medals and probably holds the NHL record for holding the most records. He is credited with changing…

Your staff’s personality as a sliding scale — What are the odds of being hit by lightning? How about the odds of winning millions in the lottery? Or getting two flat tires on the same trip? Answer: probably better than predicting the lifespan of a pharmacy interview candidate during their first interview. With a very sparse amount of…