The hope of healthcare, Part 5 - the agency to act

I had a mentor tell me one time that people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. What do you think of this statement? Do you need to be taught or do you need to be reminded? Have you ever experienced that moment where something happened, and you told yourself that you knew better? (Side note, I had that experience just a couple of weeks ago when I went to the movies to see the new Spider-Man movie and proceeded to eat practically the whole bucket of popcorn. Fast forward to the middle of the night when I was most uncomfortable and thinking about how I knew better.) I believe we find agreement in that we do indeed need to be reminded more than we need to be taught.

As we continue to consider this wonderful topic of pharmacists as the Hope of Healthcare, I need to remind you of something that is very important. You have agency.

If you are anything like me, you may not use the word agency with any regularity or you may even be completely unfamiliar with its use in this context. Agency refers to your ability to take action. It is the capacity to do things your own way with the intent of a better outcome. 

In the pharmacy, we often find ourselves locked into rigorous workflows designed to reduce, if not eliminate, the possibility of errors being made. In other words, we all have agency. But...having agency is not permission to be reckless. Rather, agency is the ability to do things in such a way as to make an improvement. 

We all have so much agency. The thing is, we often forget that we do when we get wrapped up in the daily grind. 

As I began learning leadership principles and seeing the lack of those principles all around me, I was so encouraged when I was reminded that I had agency to impact things in my little corner of the world. And that is what I did. I started taking actions that changed the trajectory of my career. One of the things I did was to schedule reading time every day. In full transparency, I am not what some would call a good reader. To some extent, reading is real work for me (even when I am reading Spider-Man). But I found a couple of books with short chapters and started there. And you know what happened? I started improving. As I was improving, my contributions to various activities changed, and for the better. And because I was growing, I was excited. I was seeing new possibilities and new opportunities. 

A few members of my team and I ended up at a training program for point-of-care tests in Alexandria, Virginia, around that time. It was a multi-day training program and at the end of the first day, I pulled my team into an empty conference room and reminded them of their agency. 

I emphasized the need to continue to improve our skillsets to continue to push things forward. I did not prescribe what skillsets they needed to develop, rather, I reminded them of their agency to develop those skillsets and gave them permission to start each day “sharpening the saw.” All I asked was that they share what skillsets they were working on each week with me. And they did. As a result, my job became so much easier because my team was getting better. 

My wife went away for a few days recently and one evening she called to see how things were at home. During the course of the conversation, she asked if I had been watering the flowers.  Uh, “no.” I didn’t need to be taught that flowers needed watering, but I did need reminding. Perhaps you have seen this same thing. You find some flowers that need to be watered because they look droopy and defeated, but a short time after watering them, they perk up and are standing tall. 

My experience is that people are the same. Far too many people go through the challenges of life and like the flowers needing to be watered, begin to droop. It is not that we don’t know water is needed, sometimes we simply need to be reminded. If pharmacy is to be the hope of healthcare, we need to be reminded of the agency we have to grow and expand – to bloom and stand tall like those watered flowers! As a profession, we have so much within our grasp right now where we can make a significant impact. And we should make the biggest impact we can!

Where are you exercising your agency?  What impact are you making?  Share your experiences with me on LinkedIn.

Until next time

Jesse McCullough, PharmD

Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn