Behaviors for Practicing Stewardship in Pharmacy Leadership

David Hager, PharmD, BCPS, Director, Clinical Pharmacy Services, University of Wisconsin Health, Madison, WI, discusses behaviors that practice stewardship through leadership. This video was filmed at the 2019 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Summer Meeting in Boston.

David Hager, PharmD, BCPS: Some important leadership behaviors that allow us to be more servant leaders are leaders that base their actions on stewardship principles. The first one is really to push decisions down. We want to make decisions about how the organization is going to operate as close to the work as possible. We want to find individual strengths and when we find those strengths we want to cultivate them. We want to use them and position people in roles and opportunities, to use them more.

We want—and this is hard for somebody like me—we want to talk less, and we want to listen more. I think a lot of us, as leaders, that the more we talk, the more we’ll be able to share our vision, and we might be missing out on great opportunities to hear what others, who are smarter than we are and thought about things more, really think. We might be missing some key opportunities.

I think, finally, we want to work with our teams to create a vision, and we want to share that vision with them. I think leadership has a lot to do with getting out of the day-to-day, showing people where they’re going to go, and to give them hope that the challenges we may face today in health care can be overcome.