Pharmacy Brand Building Starts by Developing Your A-Team

No pharmacy ever developed an outstanding brand without having put together its A-team. It’s like trying to play major league baseball, or NFL football without the players, without the training, and without a playbook.

To become the undisputed king of your niche, you need a good organizational development plan. Here are the basic attributes of such a plan:

• Hire talented people who have the 3 most important characteristics that qualify them to be members of your A-team. And experience is definitely not one of them!
• Develop the vision of your ideal pharmacy and share it with your team members.
• Develop a culture built on your passion of what you are about and what you definitely want to be all about. Develop it thoroughly throughout your organization.
• Have a training or development guide that maps out (on paper) and fully implements every aspect of your vision and your culture.
• Bring out hidden talents in each individual. This is best done through staff meetings and individual mentoring sessions. You would be surprised at how many talents you can discover that can be highly beneficial to your pharmacy. This is one of the truly unheralded discoveries that you could make.
• Establish standards of excellence for every area of your pharmacy, where you want performance to be at its highest level. Discuss those standards with team members at staff meetings.
• Constantly challenge team members to improve in specific areas.
• Build on each individual’s strengths—their shortcomings will then fade into the background.
• Actively supervise those who report to you—look over their shoulders until they perform a given task to your level of excellence—and spell out, on paper, that level from the very beginning.
• Get different people to volunteer to take a task or 2 off your shoulders—above and beyond what your operations manager is currently doing.
• Devote major supervisory time to your second-in-command—your operations manager. Since she is the one who directs the day-to-day and week-to-week operating details, it is important that you help her achieve the highest level of performance she is capable of rendering. It makes your job much easier.

There you have the 11 most sustaining strategies that build strength into your organization, and ultimately wealth into your pharmacy. Each contributes to success. Collectively, they establish the foundation on which you can build your A-team. And collectively, they will help constantly build your bank account.

The Pharmacy Sage can be reached at (518) 346-7021 or Lester@ThePharmacySage.com