A pharmacist’s journal: writing to find answers in pharmacy

What are the seven characteristics of ideal pharmacy leaders?

There is a line that has stuck with me from the time I was a pharmacy student: onto paper and out of your head.

It means that writing down our thoughts allows us to press the pause button on stress and return to it with a fresh mindset the next day. Observing how this bedside-notebook technique was a solution for me in my 20s, I have naturally continued a journaling process to solve problems throughout my pharmacy practice.

Now through over a decade of navigating pharmacy from the trenches, that notebook has become quite thick. In a two-year long analysis of the countless journal entries, I have discovered a fundamental thesis of what I has trying to figure out.

What are the characteristics of a great pharmacy leader?

In writing about the anecdotes and lessons offered by managing people, the business and the profession, I found seven recurrent themes, which I called the seven dimensions of the ideal pharmacy leader. Isolating these would guide me in what to strive for in my own behaviour and habits and what to look for when hiring staff.

To help categorize these characteristics, I paired them with an adjective to isolate their specificity, then labeled them with the anagram LAYERED.

Together, they are: limitless humility, absolute autonomy, yearn for culture, elemental belief, relentless systems and structure, esoteric grit and decision discipline.

Check out the more colourful description here and listen to the important conversation about being a pharmacy leader on The Business of Pharmacy Podcast with host Mike Koelzer here.

The Layered Leadership platform currently hosts tools and services for pharmacists that include: digital tools, a pharmacy mastermind, a VIP-Day staffing consultation solution, an online course, a weekly article in Canadian Healthcare Network, pharmacy conference speaking engagements and a free weekly newsletter.