Succession planning: Delayed gratification sucks (but it’s so worth it in your pharmacy planning)

Like many things in life, hard work doesn’t always give you benefits right away.

• You hire someone and invest training time. But it takes months for their mastery so they can pull significant weight.
• You exercise three times a week but don’t lose weight until months later.
• You save money by skipping splurges over and over again your bank account looks the same until the end of the year.

One critical example of delayed gratification in your pharmacy: your succession plan. This is the route of teaching and preparation that needs to happen over the longer term to allow a seamless turnover of the guard, turning preceptors into their mentors. 

Operate without it and you are only great now. 

Operate with it and you are great forever. 

As a pharmacy leader your goal should be to have the team deliver greater results after you are gone, demonstrating the power of your leadership in building teams, systems and culture. Unfortunately, leaders often secretly hope that their past workplace will decline in hopes that it makes them look better:

“Yeah, when I left that place, it crumbled. It literally fell apart."

Even if you can’t buy in to this vision of building a succession plan to allow the next leader to build better on your vision, you can at least accept that you should also have a succession plan for backup. The greatest systems can run for weeks without you, so the work you put into succession planning pays dividends for you and your current team when things run smoothly while you are away (and so that you are not overwhelmed upon return!).

How do I create a succession plan for my pharmacy in 3 easy steps?

1) Use the succession planning kit, which starts with a fillable PDF of what you currently have on board. It easily helps you identify the longevity and vulnerabilities in each major position.

2) Next, the kit contains a graph that easily allows you to plot the current staff on a grid of motivation/interest vs. knowledge/skill. This will help you isolate which people are in the right seats (and wrong seats) so you can begin next step assignments and identify teachable moments on the fly. 

3) Finally, with your current situation painted as a whole from the above 2 steps, use the hiring internally triangle one-pager to ensure the less experienced staff grow in the right direction. The pharmacy training step ladder image gives relevant examples of tasks for front-shop clerks, students, assistants, technicians, pharmacists and managers/owners as they grow. 

Succession plans are hard work. They will be in constant flux but remain intact at the core. The exercise allows pharmacy leaders to surgically dissect their team and business, making them a better operator with a finger on the pulse. The future of their pharmacy and the communities they serve depends on it. Be great, forever. 

If you worked for someone, wouldn’t you want them to have that succession plan?