Layered Pharmacy Leadership
Blogs
- 8/1/2023
Is your pharmacy staff high maintenance?
Do you have a friend with repeated car problems or perhaps own a car like this yourself? That car ends up costing you time and money repeatedly and the frustration has you thinking about a new vehicle. That car is high maintenance. In thinking about your pharmacy team, do you have high maintenance staff members? - 7/25/2023
The second opinion: the art of changing your pharmacy-boss mind
It is the boss’s job to filter the conversations of the workplace and make informed decisions. The hardest part of being the pharmacy decision-maker comes in the times we are wrong. When that happens, do you have the guts to change your mind? - 7/18/2023
What Goldilocks teaches us about difficult pharmacy work
You know the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Remember the porridge that was just the right temperature and the bed that was just the right softness? The same goes for the work you give your pharmacy staff: they need to be challenged, without drowning or coasting. - 7/4/2023
Thick skin: how not to take patient feedback personally
As part of the duties of being a pharmacist, our job involves helping people when they are not at their best. Empathetically recognizing that they carry burdens with their visits to see us is the first step to being the helper (as bystander) instead of a combatant fighting against them. - 6/20/2023
3 reasons pharmacists are lonely
There seems no reprieve to the pharmacist’s daily battles, let alone carrying the weight of nurturing a high-volume prescription count, staff that need plenty of attention and keeping an eye on a business that depends on a ton of moving parts. - 6/20/2023
Letting the phone ring can be good customer service in pharmacy
While a pharmacist is counselling a patient in-person, would it be appropriate for them to stop to answer the phone? Would we expect this of a surgeon or a plumber? Then why do we have to stop what we are doing mid-thought to answer the phone in the first two or three rings for the sake of good customer service? - 6/13/2023
Pharmacists, firefighters and architects: which one are you?
Some urgent moments of pharmacy involve getting prescriptions filled, managing wait times and dealing with due dates like order cut-off times, answering phones and patient line-ups. While this urgent work needs to be done, it does not offer much by way of making the pharmacy operate more efficiently or being ready for the future. - 6/6/2023
Solving the pharmacy hiring drought, Part 2
People are any workplace’s most valuable asset. They are what make it all tick. To run a great pharmacy, we need great people. To find great people, we need to interview like a champion. Knowing that executing a great interview is a skill and hiring the right person is essential, it is worth time analyzing what interview questions pull out the most value in the least amount of time and what red flags we cannot afford to miss. - 5/30/2023
Solving the pharmacy hiring drought, Part 1
Gone are the days where your next hire would walk in, shake your hand and a conversation led to finding your next all-star. The fact that this may have even worked in the past is mind-blowing. To find more résumés, we need to plant seeds, but not just when we need to actively grow something. We need to constantly be recruiting instead of waiting for a workforce gap to happen. - 5/23/2023
What do you do when all your pharmacy staff quit?
Workplace exit happens organically when new philosophies and overarching reassessments happen inside a team. When a leader begins examining history, gathering mental data, asking questions and offering change, people naturally follow suit by doing the same in their own role. Suddenly they see restart potential for themselves. - 5/16/2023
Do you want every patient as a patient in your pharmacy? Discharging the incompatible ones
The patient-healthcare provider bond is an alliance of honesty, understanding and trust. In our best attempts to provide patient care, we sometimes fail to establish the required relationship based on the way a patient treats us or the staff. This can feel like an incompatibility or inability to connect in a collaborative way. - 5/9/2023
Are pharmacists too nice to get paid?
The pharmacist personality is commonly a confrontation-avoider. We will often put ourselves out for the sake of others. People are used to getting our attention whenever they want it, no matter how small their query.