By Brigitte Donato for our “99 Ways to Make a Positive Difference in Your Pharmacy” blog series

Evaluating your own strengths and weaknesses will help you enhance not only your personal performance, but should also improve store operations as well. When you can honestly assess what your weaknesses are, you can look for those qualities as strengths in your staff or new hires to provide balance in the store.

When you and your staff have strengths and weaknesses that compliment one another, it should help to create a seamless shopping experience for your customers. While you need to know the skill sets each of your staff excel in or are lacking, they also need to be self-aware. When your team can admit their weaknesses, they can ask for assistance or support of their co-workers that do have those skills. Likewise, when they are confident in their strengths, they can step in and help out a fellow team member who might not be as strong in a particular area. This kind of teamwork helps the store run smoothly and ensures your patients enjoy consistent service levels.

You can also get your customers’ perspectives by making a suggestion box available. Customers who give you feedback on their experience shopping at your store can sometimes shed light on areas that need to be addressed.

Reevaluating the strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your staff on a regular basis is a good practice. Checking in semi-annually or annually should be often enough. There may be members of your team that turned a weakness around into an area they excel in, or perhaps you provided training to eliminate some of the weaker skills on your staff across the board. You can also consider reassessing where everyone’s skills are when you have change, such as new staff or new processes or practices in place. It doesn’t have to be a difficult exercise if you focus on the positives and opportunities for growth

 As a data entry assistant, Brigitte uses the process and procedures in place to enter, proof and evaluate descriptive and transcriptive information related to product attributes, back of package information, marketing language and packaging changes.