APhA 2025: Empowering Pharmacy Leaders by Navigating Challenges and Personal Boundaries

In an interview with Pharmacy Times®, Lauren W. Bristow, PharmD, MBA, senior director of Pharmacy for Providence, discusses the importance of emotional intelligence and well-being in pharmacy leadership, highlighting her presentation at the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) Annual Meeting & Exposition.

Bristow emphasizes the need for flexibility, autonomy, and strategic resource management. She highlights the challenges of doing more with less and the critical importance of setting personal and professional boundaries. Bristow shares personal experiences of balancing leadership roles with family responsibilities, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation focuses on how leaders can maintain productivity while prioritizing personal wellness, advocating for intentional decision-making about time, energy, and professional commitments.

Pharmacy Times: What role does emotional intelligence play in leadership, and how can leaders improve their emotional intelligence?

Lauren Bristow: What I talk about in my session is people feel less burdened when they feel power and flexibility and autonomy to make choices. For me, that's where, if I say, you have to take a break, when you take a break, I'll leave up to you. You're an adult, you're a professional. I trust you to make the call, but it's safer for you, it's safer for the patients and it's safer for the rest of the team if you take that break. Please trust me in doing that. For my leaders, the same I need you to take time off like by the end of this week, I want to know when you have your next time off scheduled, so that you have that to look forward to, because you need that release so that you can come back. Even our brains, the way our brain’s function, you can be in flow mode, focus mode for only so long, and then you have to go back down to be able to get back to flow mode. Our lives on a larger scale are the same.

Pharmacy Times: What are some common well-being challenges pharmacy leaders face, and how do you recommend overcoming them?

Bristow: Frontline and leaders some of the ones, the challenges that they have in common is we're constantly challenged to do more. The other reality is, often it's do more with less, or what feels like less — sometimes it truly is less. As leaders, we are often challenged with tracking productivity, and we have to be able to turn out X amount of widgets with no loss of productivity and that means people, right. When it comes to thinking through those challenges, what I like to do and encourage my leaders to do is, we as leaders really have to advocate for there being a limit to what we can do on that. What I find people are uncomfortable with is negotiating limited resources. What I mean when I say that is when there's a new plan or a new service that they want pharmacy to provide, or a new plan of correction that we need to be doing differently to meet regulatory concerns, we just add more.

Pharmacy is capable and able to do it usually better than most, in my opinion. I'm a huge pharmacy advocate. I think we can do everything better, but that means we need to stop doing something. Then it's that hard look of, okay, what do we let go? If I see my team really struggle with, what is something that I can give to somebody else, what are we doing that someone else can do? Then what do we do that no one else can do, or that we do significantly better? Then at some point, you have to go to the powers that be and negotiate, we will do this for you if I'm in a situation right now where I'm like, we are the only ones who can do this. We see the value of it, we will keep doing it. And I'm going to need this amount of FTE to continue doing that, especially since you see value, we want to grow this program in partnership with other disciplines. This is what pharmacy needs to do, to do it right. We've optimized all we can. We will continue to optimize, but we have to have this piece to do it right, and I think we can do that as individuals as well. At some point, if we have to reevaluate, is this the right spot for me because my job life concurrence is not fitting, we can do that. There are many options. We are marketable, we are adaptable. If we believe that about ourselves, whether it's an individual or a leader, we can find the right fit for us.

Pharmacy Times: How do you set boundaries in a high-demand environment while still being an accessible leader?

Bristow: To me, this is so personal. It's taken a lot of check and adjust for me in the process of doing this. Unlike most others that I know about, I joined leadership right after having children. When I joined leadership, I literally came out of maternity to leave to join leadership and so not really knowing what I was doing and worked in an environment where if something hit the fan, leaders were on. You stayed on, you stayed available. I remember getting a call at 6:30 on Saturday morning because something had gone sideways, and you were expected to be there and be available. Over time — and to be fair, some of the situations where we did have to be always on were large scale, needing to be all hands-on deck incident command type situations. It was understandable. Knowing what I know now, and it was one of the reasons what I learned from those experiences, one guided my leadership and making sure that I and my leader team have bench strengths. What I mean by that is we have redundancies. I made sure as a senior director now, am never the only person who can X. I made sure I empowered my leaders. I'm always going to stand in front of whatever choice my team makes. I'm going to have their backs if I would have done it differently, we'll talk about it after the fact. But part of it is making sure someone knows what I do, and someone can do it if I'm not here. That's a huge part of it. The other part too is just like I said, saying no and renegotiating things. If you want to have an alternative work schedule, and there's a possibility for that, have the conversation with your boss. It's about, just like all relationships, it's about mutual expectations and meeting expectations. You can do that proactively by saying, hey, I want to work from home one day a week, does this facilitate what you expect from me? What do you expect from me? What does success look like in this role, and can it be facilitated with x or y?

To me, and the other part, again, is having your personal values in order is what matters. One of the things I've encouraged one of my leaders to do is I need you to get really clear on what is more important to you than the job. There's got to be something. For me I've got family, I've got my kids, personal wellness, and health. There are things that I would choose, and the job would sacrifice so that those work out for me. I feel like any healthy person needs to have those and still understand when the time comes that the job is in conflict with that sometimes the family sacrifices. That happened for me during COVID, when I was running a COVID vaccine clinic while also being a hospital director. I had that conversation with my kids of thank you so much for helping in COVID. By you letting mommy be away from me for this amount of time, that's your part of helping with COVID. The other analogy that I use to help people is think of your life as a pie. I knew at that time the work piece of pie in my life, pie was bigger than I ever wanted it to be again. I knew it was a limited time, I knew it had an end point. I told the executives I was working with, I'm almost there to where someone else needs to take this over. Here's what I think it would look like to be successful, but I need to step back. I need to go back to my regular job and support my team and other things. It is that awareness, that conscious decision of, how much do I want exercise to be a part of my life, how much do I want extracurricular activities or volunteer or being on committees, association, leadership, things like that. How much a slice does it get to have? You need to make intentional decisions. You can do that inventory on a routine basis, so that you feel at peace with what your choices are, or you're making decisions and active headway to get back to there.