A leader's principal job: take care of your people!

You have one job as a pharmacy manager or owner.

In my recent article Why Hiring is Pharmacy's Biggest Problem and What to do About it I described having an automated hiring process to preserve the decision maker's time, while still allocating tangible energy to finding more of the right people. Now it's time to discuss what happens after you do hire. 

When you hire someone, you are committed. You can't sorta support them. You did your due diligence before pulling the trigger. That involved humbly admitting what you needed, having the belief, grit and discipline to execute your relentless system of recruiting and hiring before finally pulling the trigger.

The new staff member starts and new elements come into the picture. Some elements are as expected, others not so much. Your job: support them (no matter what). With two years of pandemic hardship involved, the leader's job will be harder than ever with growing people carrying more weight. Leaders will need to be honed in to the true needs of those on staff and be creative in how to make them successful. 

As example, here are some of the one-off support mechanism I have witnessed for some new co-workers this year, each in an effort to support their specific needs at the time: reducing hours/giving days off even while we were short, paying out sick time for brand new staff on their second, third and forth ever shift (they are part of the team like everyone else), allowing unaccrued vacation pay (they catch up to it in the months to come), providing an income bridge to complete an external unpaid training program, switching someone to another one of our pharmacy locations to better accommodate driving time/costs/home schooling schedules, paying for a rental car, building an employee assistance program for mental health counseling and finding a relocated employee a new place to live.

Now some of these may sound outrageous, essentially if you work for a corporation but it remains your job to find ways. If you don't, the problem is still yours (not head office's).

Importantly, I am not suggesting that you are invested in making it work because you (i.e., your ego!) will look bad as the person who hired them. There are surely times where candidates simply do not work out. What I am suggesting is that a leader must genuinely care about those on the team and their continued success. 

You said yes to hire someone with the information you had at the time. If challenges surface, it will not be helpful to resent or wish differently on the hire. Instead, your time is better served supporting and transforming them.

Metaphorically, if your dispensary is a football field, you worked too hard running 99 yards by strategically setting-up a system for posting ads, building a network, recruiting, cold calling, interviewing, zoom calling, back-ground checking, committing capital and making a schedule for training, only to toss it away with 1 yard to go. Resist the urge to fumble at the end, don't give up on people even when others have. Your hard work will no doubt pay off, but you only win if they score in the end. If you liked this article, keep the fire burning.

PS: Over a decade of pharmacy management experience leads me to a fundamental lesson: