Hiring Essential: Attitude over Skill

Resisting temptation of the quick fix that will not last

Pharmacy is in a staffing crisis. In an era where we often feel the need to add skill now, we might be best to hit pause.

Injecting skill is tempting since it is immediately useful. However, skill that does not fit is a bandage that will eventually fall off. Worse, that mismatched person will have taken up labour and training time from a more long-term person. When we finally deem that bad attitude as the wrong person, we have to start from scratch, again.

The entry point of an employee into an organization is an important time. Putting in work and patience into the time leading up to this is something a pharmacy leader needs to be meticulous and calculated about. Rush this process and mistakes can surface that are nearly impossible to fix.

Business researcher and author Jim Collins writes that great companies have a habit of getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus before driving anywhere. Getting the bus down the road and realizing the passengers are not the right ones could yield a wasted trip. Worse yet, sometimes starting over is not possible without serious implications.

Before a manager in any industry makes a hiring maneuver, the team culture should be clearly understood. When the atmosphere is right to bear life, then we are ready to breed. Everyone on board should buy-in to the why and how of the way things are done. The decision-making style and overarching values of the organization should be well enunciated. If they are, then hiring the right people is easy once they are found. Then you are ready to hire for attitudes that fit into that culture, instead of hiring for skill that you are hoping will be a quick fix.

Investing in the necessary time up front will save you an exponential amount of time later. Trust that the process yields the right people, imbedded into the right culture.