Spinning bad pharmacy problems to your advantage

On winning with elemental belief

A good staff member gave us her resignation the other day. This is certainly not the first time a staffing change presents a problem in pharmacy, yet every time you lose a good person it has you feeling like you have a new problem to solve. But there is a new question I ask myself when problems now happen:

How could I spin this to my advantage?

Understanding that problems sometimes force you to make a change that you would not have otherwise is a learned skill. It is the stepping stone to recognizing that forced change can make you stronger. For that, we need an elemental belief that we have the right systems and network of people involved. For this reason, elemental belief makes up one of the E's in LAYERED. 

In the case of this resignation, it forced us to reassess what growth we will have coming and what downsides we had with the previous staffing line-up, on route to identify our perfect new need. In the end, we added a replacement person who also ended up being a new tenant of ours, since we own an apartment unit above the pharmacy. We got the opportunity to create a new job for someone and a place to live for her family.

The special advantage came in the conversations that occurred throughout the process. It forced us to rethink other elements of the operation and we ended up creating a new position for a casual "when needed" person, who we found in our network. 

Because of the change, we are stronger and more resilient, not only in the slightly bigger yet precise roster model but also in the many conversations that occurred at many levels. We evaluated scheduling, staff personalities, compensation and re-engaged our local employment office, which gave us 5 new resumes to keep on file for later. Of the five, I interviewed three to practise our interview before need philosophy.  (Note to editor: can we link here to my May post called “Why Hiring is Pharmacy’s Biggest Problem and What to do about it” Thanks!)

Elementally believe you will come out stronger in the end.

Elementally believe there is a net advantage to come of your next problem.