Dispensing Leadership: The Law of Rhythm

As pharmacies move into back-to-school, flu, and the start of cough-and-cold season, hosts Shawn Bjorndal, PharmD, RPh, and Jesse McCullough, PharmD, are urging to slow down and notice patterns that shape what occurs in pharmacy practice. On this month’s episode, they discuss what they call the “Law of Rhythm,” one of what McCullough describes as 7 laws of creation that govern the natural world.

The law of rhythm states, simply, that everything moves in a predictable cycle. Day follows night and seasons follow one another in the same order every year. Even a household falls into a rhythm once school starts back up, only to have that rhythm disrupted again each summer. McCullough argues that recognizing these cycles, rather than fighting them, gives people a sense of stability even when the expectations that come with a season are not always welcome.

For pharmacists, that same principle applies directly to daily practice. Flu vaccination season, for example, arrives on a fairly predictable timeline every year. Pharmacists who understand that rhythm can prepare for it, staff for it, and set realistic expectations for how the season will unfold.

Understanding the Law of Gestation

McCullough introduced a companion concept called the law of gestation, which holds that everything requires a certain amount of time to mature. He pointed to the animal kingdom for examples, noting that a human pregnancy takes about 40 weeks while an elephant's takes nearly 2 years. The point, he said, is that maturity timelines vary widely, and pharmacy initiatives are no different.

Bjorndal connected this idea to his own experience helping a former intern, now an independent pharmacy owner, launch new clinical programs. He described the common experience of building a service, believing it is ready to take off, and watching it gain only a handful of patients in its first weeks. That slow start they are describing does not mean the service has failed; it often means the market needs more time to adopt it.

McCullough offered a personal example from his own career. When Pennsylvania first allowed pharmacists to administer flu shots, he was among a small group trained for the service. Regulatory delays pushed the first shots back, and the numbers were modest, with one colleague administering only 18 shots across an entire season.

Today, McCullough noted, many pharmacists give that many shots before noon on a single day.

Applying Both Laws Together

The hosts stressed that the 2 laws work best when applied together. A pharmacist might correctly understand that a new service will take time to mature, but if the timing is off, such as promoting flu shots in the spring instead of the fall, the effort is unlikely to succeed regardless of how sound the underlying idea is.

McCullough closed the episode with a story from The Richest Man in Babylon, a century-old personal finance book that shaped his thinking. In it, a struggling man learns that wealth eludes those who either do not know the laws that govern it or know the laws but fail to follow them. McCullough applies that reasoning to pharmacy leadership, explaining that awareness of the laws of rhythm and gestation is only the first step, when the real test is whether pharmacists choose to work in harmony with those natural patterns rather than against them.

In Dispensing Leadership, a podcast offering from Drug Topics and RPhAlly, Bjorndal and McCullough discuss essential leadership skills for pharmacists, how to develop them, and how to advance the pharmacy profession. All new episodes of Dispensing Leadership will be available in a video format via DrugTopics.com on the second Monday of each month. Check out our most recent episode: The Hardest Person to Lead.