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Bold prediction: Pharmacists will grow in medical responsibility and clinical expertise. But while complexity (and exhaustion) increase, who will take care of the pharmacists?

The simplest way to obtain buy-up is togetherness. A team matures when they are united and have each other to follow. During turmoil, if they win as a team no one overstays their welcome by taking too much glory.

Whether you like it or not, optically you are the expert. Your words and actions drive behaviour change and it is up to you to provide the feedback that allows staff to navigate their own individual mastery curves.

To be a better pharmacist, unmask new success by committing to your obsessions and unleashing your inner badass.

Decisions are like pinballs. They bring downstream side-effects in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Some pinballs change the internal (staff) environment while others change the external (customer) environment.

The ‘complete retail pharmacy experience’ has a way of bringing out the pharm-grumpies. But take heart, there is an antidote.

Leaders build pipelines. They manage the future by thinking ahead while still managing the day. They forecast, they calculate, they design without allowing the anxiety of the unknown to take over.

Solving hiring in pharmacy will first mean finding more candidates without a sizeable investment of our time.

Relative to the history of our profession, only more recently have pharmacists been pushed to invent from scratch through prescribing.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is something pharmacists recommend. Scientific literature proves its place as a first-line therapy in mental health.

As pharmacists we can’t live like students in an adult world. We need to invest in life structure because life as a pharmacist is longer than a four-year degree.

At the stroke of 2023, Ontario pharmacists were capable of initiating prescription medications without patients seeing a prescriber beforehand. It is a major solution to a major ailment plaguing a complex and congested healthcare system.

Your job is to create the systems and structures paired with people and resources that shift the balance of your Rx count as far to the predictable side as possible.

The right succession plan isolates your strengths and weaknesses, or depth, while putting you in control of your destiny.

We love superheroes and villains because they are unique in their clear identity. We understand their strengths, their weaknesses and what makes them special. Why should you be any different?

In any given hour the always accessible, no-appointment needed, world’s number one trusted health care provider has phones ringing, patients in the aisles looking for recommendations, patients waiting in the counselling room for vaccines, deliveries

Yes, without genuine washroom breaks it’s true that pharmacists can hold water like camels, but there is a more important similarity: they can both carry significant loads on their backs.

From the first day I became a pharmacy manager 15 years ago now, I wondered what the difference was in flipping my nametag from Pharmacist yesterday to Pharmacy Manager today.

Your boss might not make these metrics mandatory but that doesn’t mean they don’t provide insightful data into your store-level operation. Just like individual practitioners, pharmacies themselves have identities. What's yours?

A U-turn is a manoeuvre to completely change direction. For most decisions in life, changing direction goes without much notice or consequence. Most of life’s day-to-day decisions don’t carry much consequence if we get them wrong.

Pharmacists don’t always take their own advice. We counsel on sleep hygiene and appropriate sedative use, then go home and turn on the TV or burn 35 minutes on our phones.

The make-up of a triathlete is not all that different from that of a pharmacist. Years of triathlon training and racing have taught me many translatable skills and qualities that have translated into my becoming a better pharmacy leader.

Sleep permits the brain to process the day, wipe away the emotional fragility of our interactions and wipe the slate clean. That’s the reason we say ‘sleep on it’ since you will be fresh-minded in the morning to decide.

We were pushed to set goals as kids. What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you think you can achieve on the exam? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? So, what's the problem with goal-setting?

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.

When pharmacy staff get angry words from patients, what the pharmacy manager says next means something. Something potentially very important to how the interaction carries on.

Like doctors, in pharmacy we have specialists and generalists. I am referring to each of your registered and unregistered staff. The specialists are bone-deep great at a few skills that they have honed over years of experience.

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.

So many times, life defaults us to approach mental 'balance' from the negative instead of the positive. In order to take, we must also give.

So many times, life defaults us to approach mental 'balance' from the negative instead of the positive. In order to take, we must also give.

A succession plan is more than fluff. It puts what is repetitively swirling in your head onto paper. Either write it down to get it out of your head or accept that it will haunt you tonight.

Recently a mentor of mine said: “You don’t want to grow too much, Jason; more people, more problems.” While I understand what they mean, I prefer to think about staff size as what fits tightly into your depth chart, a visual of your current staff and

Surrounding yourself with the right people will keep the competitive juices flowing and allow you to accomplish things you otherwise would not have. But that will only be part of the battle.

Without municipal water you would have to carry an empty bucket to a well two miles away, take a scoop to fill your bucket and walk it back to your house.

There are feedback loops with positive and negative impacts happening all day long, whether you notice them or not. What if you could harness positive loops and blunt the negative ones?

While we all dream of this fairly-tale orchard-type succession plan, the current environment and low inventory of perfect people simply do not allow it. You know people-development should be your highest priority, you just don’t know where to start.

A recent Canadian Pharmacist Association national survey on pharmacists’ mental health revealed some disturbingly negative results with many of us at risk of leaving the profession and others currently looking elsewhere for work.

Pharmacy leaders appreciate that some percentage of their Rx count is predictable and the rest is unpredictable. The leverage comes in pushing the scale toward the predictable side

The Do-er is often less job satisfied, of shorter duration in one pharmacy site and less motivated to take on life-benefiting after work extracurriculars.

In pharmacy, the work and the rewards are what you make them. Putting the work in the right way yields the right rewards.

In pharmacy, we can make it easy to start by first automating the repetitive. Identify tasks that need to occur like clockwork. Use a weekly task log with day of the week headings to list what you need done on each day.

There is a dramatic cost to restarting. In my previous article The Fear All Leaders Face I discuss the power of a mental health challenge called FOMO and how to reframe thought process to overcome it.

After turning the dispensary lights out at night, despite a fear you may feel, you are not alone.

You have one job as a pharmacy manager or owner.

You are the average of the 5 people you hang around with most. But what does that mean for a pharmacy dispensary if people are too hard to come by? We have a few problems in the mix right now. Pharmacy is a tough, grinding job.

The difference between elites in any category is less than one per cent. The best of the best out-perform their colleagues across many measures of success, but in the end, what separates the greatest from the good pile lies in the fine details.