Too much to do, no time to plan?

Additional training required/planned

Once you have completed the activities, you can consider whether your team (or yourself) require additional training – possibly something you hadn’t considered before. If you already have training sessions planned, it would be good to review them to confirm they are still required.

Optimise skill mix/train in new skills/buy in new skills

The above activities may highlight gaps in the skills you have in your team members, and you may want to consider filling these before looking at the next section.

Delegation is a key activity in pharmacies, but it can be difficult to know what to delegate, especially if you’re a first-time manager. Some people struggle to delegate because they:

• Worry that it’ll take more time to explain how to do the work than to do it themselves
• Find it difficult to prioritise the work
• Feel guilty about assigning more work to other people
• Aren’t sure who else can do this work
• Are reluctant to take overall accountability for tasks that other team members do.

If you struggle with letting go of key tasks, go back to your task and competency lists and work out who in your team would be best placed to complete some of these activities.  

As with lots of things, ‘practice makes perfect’, so try letting go of smaller tasks initially until you are confident in your team’s ability to complete them to your satisfaction – and, just as importantly, you don’t feel stressed while they complete them. Team members may take longer to get this work done than you would, but by delegating work, you’re giving them the opportunity to develop their skills over time. Learning to delegate takes time, so keep at it!