Area managers are not just responsible for maintaining standards of appearance or professional, legal, health and safety or retail standards. A further element of the role of an area manager is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the business operation.

Area managers are unencumbered by the day-to-day operation of a pharmacy. They are able to provide coaching and mentoring support to improve how the pharmacy works. They can look at how the pharmacy is working with a fresh pair of eyes and see the inefficiencies that are often taken for granted.

You can do this in your own pharmacy; however, as stated in previous articles, you need to do it with a changed mindset. Taking on the role of area manager requires you to put your immersion in the operation to one side.

Effectiveness and efficiency

Effectiveness and efficiency within any business is about getting the right people in the right place at the right time, doing the right things.

The starting point is to know what the ‘right thing’ is. But what is the right thing? A useful model to think about this is known as triple loop learning (see box).

Single loop learning is about learning to do the job, a process, or to follow an SOP. This might be part of an induction or the ongoing training of a team member.

Double loop learning is about doing things more effectively. Is the process you currently follow the most efficient way of achieving the outcome you are aiming for?

A good example of double loop learning I witnessed recently related to the dispensing process. All the dispensing team were focused on dispensing prescriptions quickly, but that morning’s order was sat on the dispensary floor. The team regularly were searching through the order to find stock for the prescriptions they were dispensing. No one could see the inefficiency of this situation and the process was far from ideal. It would have been far better to use part of the team to put away stock while other members of the team dispensed.

Triple loop learning is focused on questioning whether the outcome you are aiming for is one that will take you towards your goal. We can become busy fools doing lots of tasks very efficiently, but these tasks do not help us achieve what we want. A good example of this is a pharmacy taking on a care home to achieve the outcome of increasing dispensing and consequently turnover.

However, the goal of the business is to make profit. Will dispensing for the care home lead to this outcome and be profitable with the extra costs incurred from dispensing into monitored dosage systems? It is easy to focus on being busy and active; triple loop learning allows us to consider whether they are valuable and whether they are the right things to do.

Part of the role of being your own area manager, therefore, is to confirm that an activity is valuable, and if it is, ensure that it is being done efficiently. Working with double loop learning would be described as operational management; working with triple loop learning would be described as operational leadership.