Ever find yourself working harder than you need to in the process of buying something for your pharmacy? When choosing a vendor, I have learned that I prefer to do business with those I can communicate with, which is a nice way of saying that I do not have to babysit them.

Compartmentalization permits risk management. Viewing your pharmacy down into its pieces can bring tremendous advantage. Structuring workflow or systems such that if disaster happens, only pieces are lost instead of the whole may sound tedious, but after one disaster the value will be evident.

We know that emotional decisions rarely end being up the right ones. When this happens, great leaders have the ability to zoom out, resist the urge to be swept away by the details and focus on the overall broader situation.

In a repetitive pharmacy world that craves constant peaks of new-ness, those with the ability to grind will out-succeed those that make impulse decisions and routinely make big pharmacy system changes. Resisting temptation in a world of abundance can be your ally.

One job of the pharmacy leader is to moderate the range of personalities on the team. Once the right people are involved, everyone’s opinion is valid and part of the process of arriving at the best decisions, but only if everyone is given an opportunity to speak.

In the pharmacy, there are countless ways of being a set-up person.

Pharmacy is like a snow storm. During a heavy storm, we cannot keep up with the falling snow even with constant shovelling. We end up going about our lives, then dealing with the damage when the storm is over. The act of shovelling is put on hold until after the storm is over.

For the pharmacy world struggling with back orders, recalls and mixed-up orders, owing is a part of the job. But owings – or debt – for a pharmacist are analogous to the problem of lost luggage.

With a very sparse number of pharmacy staff in the neighbourhood to choose from, we now often select workers without actual pharmacy experience. This means that leaders need to have an even keener eye for detecting the cross-over skills hidden in the stories of those we are interviewing.

By their scientific method, scientists’ actions demonstrate that they do not know the true answer but have ideas as to what it could be. Scientists resist the urge to form irreversible public opinions.