Mar 2023
21 Mar
What is Layered Leadership (and why should you care as a pharmacist)?
Bold prediction: Pharmacists will grow in medical responsibility and clinical expertise. But while complexity (and exhaustion) increase, who will take care of the pharmacists?
14 Mar
Mature pharmacy teams know how to lose together
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.
07 Mar
Newbie to pro: are you good enough at something to need a coach?
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.
Feb 2023
28 Feb
Why triathlon makes me a better pharmacist
To be a better pharmacist, unmask new success by committing to your obsessions and unleashing your inner badass.
21 Feb
Pinballs: Do your decisions as a pharmacy boss invite customer agony?
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.
14 Feb
Are you the James Bond of pharmacy or just another average labcoat?
The ‘complete retail pharmacy experience’ has a way of bringing out the pharm-grumpies. But take heart, there is an antidote.
06 Feb
Pharmacy leaders build pipelines
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.
Jan 2023
31 Jan
3 steps to solving your hiring puzzle
Solving hiring in pharmacy will first mean finding more candidates without a sizeable investment of our time.
24 Jan
Pharmacists have teleprompters for brains
Relative to the history of our profession, only more recently have pharmacists been pushed to invent from scratch through prescribing.
18 Jan
5 steps to help pharmacists validate negative thoughts and turn them around
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is something pharmacists recommend. Scientific literature proves its place as a first-line therapy in mental health.
10 Jan
Plan your perfect morning before opening the pharmacy
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.
04 Jan
Pharmacists have major ailments - 3 things we need before prescribing
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.
Dec 2022
13 Dec
Where's the green light for predictable pharmacy?
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.
06 Dec
Your non-lame pharmacy succession plan
The right succession plan isolates your strengths and weaknesses, or depth, while putting you in control of your destiny.
Nov 2022
29 Nov
Isolating your pharmacy leader identity
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?
22 Nov
No longer invisible: shifting from do-er to thinker as a pharmacist
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
15 Nov
Pharmacists are like camels but they can't 'hold it' forever
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.
08 Nov
Why wearing a labcoat doesn't make you a pharmacy leader
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.
01 Nov
6 things a pharmacy manager should measure (but usually doesn’t)
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?
Oct 2022
25 Oct
4 top U-turn decisions pivotal to your pharmacy practice
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.
18 Oct
Five top sleep habits for pharmacists and how to win with them
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.
11 Oct
Pharmacy leaders resemble triathletes in at least 7 ways
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.
04 Oct
Sleep on it! Turning it on and off in your pharmacy
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.
Sep 2022
27 Sep
Stop setting goals for your pharmacy. Do this instead
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?
20 Sep
Succession planning: Delayed gratification sucks (but it’s so worth it in your pharmacy planning)
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.
13 Sep
How does a pharmacy rebound from criticism?
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.
06 Sep
Your pharmacy staff: generalists or specialists?
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.
Aug 2022
30 Aug
Spinning bad pharmacy problems to your advantage
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.
23 Aug
Give and take in pharmacy – On finding mental balance
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.
23 Aug
Give and take in pharmacy – On finding mental balance
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.
16 Aug
Size matters in pharmacy: more people, more problems (Part 2 of 2)
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.
09 Aug
Size matters in pharmacy: more people, more problems (Part 1 of 2)
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
02 Aug
Don't be afraid to find your competition
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.
July 2022
26 Jul
3 top tips to plug your pharmacy holes
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.
19 Jul
Feedback loops in pharmacy workflow
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?
12 Jul
Great staff don’t grow on trees and what to do about it
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.
05 Jul
What type of pharmacy manager are you?
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.
June 2022
28 Jun
Your Rx count: predictable or not?
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
21 Jun
Are you the ‘do-er’ or the ‘thinker’ in your dispensary?
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.
14 Jun
The rewards in pharmacy need work
In pharmacy, the work and the rewards are what you make them. Putting the work in the right way yields the right rewards.
07 Jun
3 ways to fix the start barrier in your pharmacy
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.
May 2022
31 May
Pharmacists, interruptions can kill your train of thought
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.
24 May
The fear all pharmacy leaders face
After turning the dispensary lights out at night, despite a fear you may feel, you are not alone.
17 May
A leader's principal job: take care of your people!
You have one job as a pharmacy manager or owner.
10 May
Why hiring is pharmacy’s biggest problem and what to do about it
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.
03 May
Reacting vs leading – how do pharmacists stay ahead as leaders to prevent returning to the ‘labcoat’?
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.
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