Accepting bad news in your pharmacy

There is a business concept that I have grown to appreciate: it is better to receive bad news early. In fact, sooner is always better than later.

The more time we have to plan for fallout, the better equipped we will be to implement a plan. Even though we do not want to hear bad news, we are better off with a ‘heads up’ than we are being blindsided.

When the pharmacy debit service goes down, we put a person at the front door to message customers before they enter. We hate losing a sale but are better off giving them time to adjust before telling them at the cash, after spending 30 minutes shopping.

We are better off hearing that someone is quitting weeks before they leave so we can execute our next staffing move before they leave altogether.

We are better not surprising patients with the price of a drug by saying, “You don’t want to know the price” when they drop off. This way, we find out if they do not want the prescription before working on it.

We are better to have someone quit in their first week when the other résumés are still fresh than to have them struggle with the job for a year and quit then, forcing us to restart the recruitment process at step one.

In business, we rarely like surprises.

Why do others procrastinate giving us bad news?

Bad news is confrontational. We hesitate to disrupt homeostasis because we are afraid of the negative emotions it will cause others and ourselves. The imagined response in anticipation of our inflammatory reaction makes others procrastinate.

What if there were a way to force bad news from coming out before it is too late?

I have discovered that others tell me bad news earlier if I make it known that I want to operate proactively, in good times and bad. I like saying the line:

This line sets a culture of planning for those delivering and accepting bad news. It teaches others that dispensing bad news late is a disservice to the boss, the team, the patients and the business.

True story: understanding the necessity of telling me anything early, a pharmacy assistant told me she was planning on taking a job interview for a local competitor. She explained that the other pharmacy was offering full-time hours, something we could not do for her at the time, and listed other perks that seemed too good to be true.

I thanked her for telling me, and not wanting to ever hold back anyone from an opportunity, I told her I was skeptical of the true story and encouraged her to go ahead with the interview. Knowing a little about the hiring manager, I suggested she ask a few specific questions that she had not thought of. Those questions involved hearing more detail about others who worked there, the typical schedule, a few of their specific procedures and exactly how many hours they considered “full-time.”

I told her that we would hate to see her go but would support her decision either way. One week later, she returned from the interview and said, “I’m staying. Thanks for prepping me.”

We were able to save a valuable contributor because she understood the power of delivering bad news early. In hearing bad news, we need to avoid responding in ways they will traditionally expect, such as yelling at them, offering them more money or overhauling our internal structure. We simply develop a culture that gives us the gift of time to think things through.

There is nothing you can’t tell me. But tell me early.

Side note: It is not uncommon for pharmacy staff to think the grass is greener on the other side. If we are confident in the culture we have set and the way we treat people, we should encourage them to explore the other side.

After all, if they do not want to work for us when compared to an alternative job, why are they here?

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