My grandfather, who was a carpenter, told me once, “Any job is easy when you have the right tool.”

Leaders help people go from where they are to where they want to be.

About 12 years ago, the team I was serving on was given the task of training thousands of pharmacists to provide immunization services.

“Everyone deserves to be led well.” These are the words my mentor spoke to me some months ago. While I understood leadership to be important, these words helped to frame the importance of leadership in a new way for me.

The last time we met, I introduced the concept of leadership and gave encouragement that leadership skills can be learned. That's all well and good. But as pharmacists, we need to have something a little more substantial to work from. We need a definition of leadership.

During my time in pharmacy school, I took a lot of classes – important classes. I learned all sorts of things during my time in school. But there was one class that started in a very memorable way.