- 4/9/2024
The best pharmacy leaders do not have all the answers, but they do know how to mobilize teams that find those answers. Before making big decisions, ask pharmacy staff what they think.
- 4/2/2024
Companies need to stop setting service goals and instead strive to solve their operator pain points. In fixing operator problems that unlock services, they will also unlock other aspects of what makes a pharmacy strong, like driving prescription and over-the-counter growth.
- 3/26/2024
The best gift you can give someone is an idea. Ideas spark hope, motivation and a new beginning. The more ideas we can generate, the greater the opportunity for positive outcomes to occur. The more connections we make between different ideas, the better the potential for greatness.
- 3/19/2024
In one of our pharmacies, we hired someone without pharmacy experience for the front shop. She worked part-time being a secondary student and was quick to learn. She was quiet, listened attentively and absorbed information like a sponge. She quickly grew in proficiency and responsibility.
- 3/12/2024
Today, the best bosses are leaders. They take care of others before themselves and serve those who execute their vision, which was developed from collective opinion. Leaders give others a chance to ask why and explain the reasons for major decisions.
- 3/5/2024
Of all the things the boss can provide to a staff there is one critical element that is easy to miss. Aside from the usual – money, time off, benefits, bonuses, training, tools and support – the boss provides something that takes staff through the hard moments and keeps them invested in the job for the long haul.
- 2/27/2024
What if you could control the way you felt by controlling the way you thought? Like a remote control for television, our negative thoughts take us to the shows playing in our heads. The good news: we can train our brains to better handle negative thoughts, so we end up watching the shows we want instead of being stuck in a bad movie, too deeply committed to walk away.
- 2/20/2024
Pharmacists are bad at taking their own advice. We counsel on sleep. We counsel on sleep hygiene. Then we go home and flush it. We doom-scroll our phones, grab a snack because we skipped food while busy at work, and sometimes even pour a drink. Then we sleep poorly and expect ourselves to run an optimal dispensary the next day.
- 2/13/2024
Have you ever stopped to consider how much you actually make per hour as a pharmacy owner? And have you considered how much you make based on the type of operation you run? You might be surprised to run the numbers.
- 2/6/2024
Reflecting on 15 years of being a pharmacist, which started as a part-time pharmacy cashier making $6.85 per hour five years before that, I have held all these traditional job titles that we find in community pharmacy. This means that through two decades, I have spent most of my time looking up the ladder and now my vantage point has me looking down the ladder for a full-circle picture of the profession and its jobs.
- 1/30/2024
People get sick, it happens. But when we see obvious patterns like repeated incidents of staff calling in sick before a weekend or the same employee being sick on a weekly basis, there is some work do to.
- 1/23/2024
We are not lawyers. We are not real estate agents. However, that does not mean we are devoid of negotiating skills. Whether we are explaining a co-pay to a patient, signing an agreement with an employer, buying a pharmacy or making a staff schedule, there are parts of the pharmacist’s day where we just have to pull up our pants and negotiate.
