Pharmacy U news

After turning the dispensary lights out at night, despite a fear you may feel, you are not alone. In my previous article “A Leader’s Principal Role: Taking Care of People" I discuss the ruthless requirement and offer tangible examples where leaders take care of people. But while this is going on, who will take care of us?

Change is a must. Change is the future, however small, for pharmacy. It’s been a while since I have written an article and it took me some time to think about a topic that is relevant yet important. Then I thought, there is nothing else more relevant to talk about than change.

A few months ago, I made reference to “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities and how they seem to come along about every two weeks. I am finding that to be very true right now.

You have one job as a pharmacy manager or owner. In my recent article Why Hiring is Pharmacy's Biggest Problem and What to do About it I described having an automated hiring process to preserve the decision maker's time, while still allocating tangible energy to finding more of the right people. Now it's time to discuss what happens after you do hire.

When you are communicating with someone, whether it be a single person or an entire audience (as with a public speaker), it is not just for information, but for transformation. The thing about transformation is that it often takes place in a series of steps. So, we must show people the next step they can take. This was a lesson that I did not grasp as a young pharmacist or when I first started speaking.

We are often asked by our clients, “How long will it take for you to sell my pharmacy," to which they seem to expect an answer of “three to six months.” A better question is: how long will it take to plan and execute my exit correctly?

Leaders must be effective communicators. There is no doubt about it. You show me a leader who struggles to communicate, and I will show you a team that is struggling to perform. A significant event in my career happened when I walked into a pharmacy in South Carolina to talk about this pharmacy’s performance on cholesterol medications and the pharmacist said to me, “I don’t know what to say to my patients.”

Wealth tends to sneak up on you as you pay off your first pharmacy mortgage and the surpluses start. Learning how to live with wealth is in fact, a new skill that needs to be learned, just like you learned your professional skills. It takes time, but the time is well worth it especially in family-run pharmacy operations.