A DOSE OF STRATEGY Five common mistakes that hold us back

Mistake #3: Making incorrect attributions

AMY OLIVER MBA, BScPh, RPh, PMP, CLC

Community pharmacists are relentlessly hardworking and productive. Adept at task-switching, you have mastered the ability to perform skilled cognitive work despite constant distractions. And recent unpredictable seasons have only confirmed your agility. But while you’ve learned to manage the pivots and shifts required through a day, we have work to do to prepare you for the pivots and shifts of the decade.

After 10 years supporting and coaching practice owners in pharmacy and other community healthcare practices, I have put together a list of five common mistakes to avoid in your practice:

Mistake #1: Acting upon assumptions instead of facts Making strategic business decisions based solely on assumptions is poor practice. We tell ourselves stories all day long across all parts of our lives. For example, Jacinda is passionate about menopause and wants to launch a non-publicly-funded menopause service. But she assumes no one would pay $200 out-of-pocket for an hour-long consultation and therefore never launches the program. Ask, “Is this an assumption, or is it a fact?” Test the water. Ask your patients. Ask your friends. Find out if your assumptions are facts before you make decisions.

Mistake #2: Lacking broad perspective

You only see the world from where you stand. To design the best services, layouts, processes and programs, you need the perspective of all those who’ll be impacted (staff, patients, allied care providers, community). Top-down decisions may be faster, but that does not mean they are better. Discussion and healthy debate will result in more successful solutions. For example, as minor ailment prescribing rolls out more broadly in Canada, I wonder how many pharmacies will have posters and bag stuffers that say something about your services in “minor ailments.” Ask 10 of your non-pharmacy friends if they know what that means, and you will see how their perspective matters when planning your marketing.

Attribution error occurs when someone attributes their success to their skills, but their failures to bad luck. It’s classic human behaviour, but you can be coached to see that it may in fact have been a lack of skill or process, not bad luck. A successful practice is not a pass or fail exercise. It’s a learning journey where you must recognize what made something successful and then do more of that. Similarly, you need to understand what factors caused something to fail, and how to fix it and move forward.

Mistake #4: Risk management as an afterthought

Community pharmacy is chronically reactive. Your tasks are typically reactive to whatever/whoever walks in the door. Continuous improvement is typically reactive to incidents. When the systems and processes fail, then pharmacy teams replan. But while agility is important, many reactive actions could have been risk-managed before they became issues. When you develop your next service, process or protocol, ask, “What could go wrong here?” and then, if your answer is probable or highly impactful, plan a risk response BEFORE you need it.

Mistake #5: Taking continuing education that is solely clinical

It’s hard to imagine becoming a pharmacist without having learned core content in therapeutics, pharmacology, physiology and more. Yet many practice owners and managers expect to be great business owners and leaders without training in business or leadership. You don’t need an MBA to run a successful practice, but you should consider diversifying your professional development to include content on management and leadership so you can make your pharmacy and business aspirations come to life.

If any of these five common missteps resonate with you, it’s time to course-correct and implement best practices to ensure mistakes like these don’t hold your potential back any longer.