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Dispensing Wellness: Walgreens’ Rx for Healthcare

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Whether it is visiting a doctor, understanding and paying a medical bill, or picking out the right health insurance plan, we can probably all agree that our regular interactions with the healthcare system are not as seamless or as easy to access as they should be. Healthcare is too hard to navigate, costs too much, and ultimately does not work well for the people it’s meant to serve — all of us.

 John Driscoll, executive vice president and president of U.S. Healthcare at Walgreens Boots Alliance, shared this article as a companion to his podcast Dispensing Wellness: Walgreens’ Rx for Healthcare.

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Too often, this lapses into pessimism, a belief that we can’t improve US healthcare. At nearly one-fifth of the economy, healthcare is too big to fail — and to fix. But the truth is that there is a lot that people can change in healthcare if they are motivated to take on these seemingly insurmountable problems.

The trick is to think like a basketball team, not a track team. In the latter, runners are out for themselves, and points are awarded for individual performance. In basketball, nearly every point scored relies on the skills and effort of the whole team. Assists are as important as goals scored, and strong defense makes offensive success possible.

Creating this collaborative environment takes embracing three principles: servant leadership, connectedness through authenticity, and innovating with transparency.

 

Servant Leadership

First, at the heart of everything is servant leadership. Servant leadership is all about keeping the people that you serve at the core of what you do. At Walgreens, our boots-on-the-ground leaders are our pharmacists. Walgreens pharmacists are in nearly 9,000 stores across the country, and especially in rural communities, pharmacists are the cornerstone of people’s perceptions of the healthcare system.

Our pharmacists embody servant leadership. Often, they are providing expert counsel while integrating kindness and compassion into every interaction they have with their community. Their servant leadership perspective prompts our pharmacists to truly go above and beyond for patients. Our pharmacists serve as the healthcare system’s air traffic control by coordinating care, knitting together patient needs, and following up to make sure those needs are taken care of. Walgreens pharmacists also help with minor injuries or illnesses and deliver care through vaccination, testing, and, in some cases, prescribing.

Our pharmacists are truly connected to their communities, and they find ways where they can really help and make a difference. Their servant leadership mentality motivates them to do so, and that culture feeds up into the entire Walgreens organization.

 

Connectedness Through Authenticity

While servant leadership can create connections to the community, it’s also important to make internal connections that strengthen teams. Authentic leadership is hard to crystalize and almost impossible to rehearse, but when it’s not there, teams fall apart. Team members have to know that their leader has passion and has their back. More importantly, team members have to believe that their leader has heart and kindness in an authentic way. If the passion isn’t genuine, it’s obvious. But when authentic leadership is there, it’s a key differentiator.

When I was in military training, I was interacting with people who had graduated from military schools and places like West Point — they were much better equipped to take on the technical and logistical tasks of our training. I wasn’t the best at many of the military skills themselves, like loading weapons or excelling on drills, but in a leadership position, I was awarded for showing heart and passion, conveying that to my organization, and taking care of my team. That created connectivity and trust among all of us.

To me, that kind of magic happens when leaders and teams find a collective purpose and trust each other to achieve that purpose. This trust facilitates what General Stanley McChrystal calls in his book, Team of Teams, “shared consciousness,” or thinking and acting as a team rather than as individuals.

In healthcare, for example, we have a collective purpose, but we don’t always have trust between stakeholders or from our patients. To be better leaders in our teams and across the industry, we have to get back to basics — show authenticity, connect to our common purpose, and trust our teammates as we all work towards our goal of serving patients and improving quality of life.

 

Innovating with Transparency

The best leaders cultivate servant leadership and create authentic connections to tie their team together, but they also keep innovating. Many leaders and organizations focus on innovation, but what takes innovation from a buzzword to the next level is changing paradigms with clear goals and transparent communication.

No team or organization stays stagnant forever — nor should we want it to. Particularly in healthcare, change happens quickly, and organizations that don’t adapt technology effectively are often left behind. At the same time, change can feel scary and uncertain for teams, especially today when conversations about new technologies like artificial intelligence are also accompanied by discussions of how many jobs AI will replace.

During times of change, transparency in leadership takes precedence. That’s why, at Walgreens, we’re being thoughtful about where our existing strengths are — our servant leaders, our people — and how AI can complement what they do. Instead of spending time counting pills and doing paperwork, AI can help our pharmacists facilitate human connection by freeing time to really listen to people, understanding their health concerns so we can treat them better. Without transparent leadership about new technology, teams fall into fear. Strategic application of technology and open communication can help teams thrive.

 

Thank you for reading the Innovative Leadership Insights, where we bring you thought leaders and innovative ideas on leadership topics each week. We strive to elevate the quality of leadership worldwide. If you are looking for help developing your leaders, explore our services.

What’s “The Arena” Performance 101?

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This week’s podcast features Brian Ferguson, Founder and CEO of Arena Labs, High Performance Medicine: Healthcare and Innovation. The blog was previously published on the Arena Labs blog.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

–THEODORE ROOSEVELT, CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC, 1910

 

If you want to be in the Arena, you don’t get there by way of drifting through life.

The Arena is a place of action, and yet it is consciousness that defines its nature: to have an Arena in the first place, you need to have intently decided: This. This is the thing I will show up for. The thing that puts my most cherished values into action. The thing around which I will design my life so that I will not only show up well but show up better and better each time.

The Arena is the space for that thing, for the body doing that thing. It’s a context for risk. People act differently in different contexts. Think of yourself in different spaces. What are the contexts in which you are raucous, loud? What are the contexts in which you are reserved, quiet? What are the contexts in which you have swagger? (Ok silly question, you always have swagger.) When it comes to developing excellence, context is an interesting thing. What happens in one context has everything to do with how far you can go in another, some of which is predictable, and a lot of which as unexpected as it is tied to the very best of our unique human nature.

The Arena is there so that you can ask, and test: how far can we go?

The rules of the Arena are established so you can accept and fully take the risk with and for others­–the only way to tap human potential­–and play all-out while holding the sanctity of safety.

Performance is the knowledge deployed in the Arena. As Kristen Holmes describes, “performance is the science of human thriving.” It has three key aspects:

  1. The identification of the internal and environmental conditions that catalyze individuals and teams to play at their best.
  2. The understanding of the physiology of stress and fear and anxiety, and of our interdependence with others.
  3. The disposition to apply this science in one’s own body and lifeworld so to catalyze growth.

Performance knowledge springs from across sectors concerned with bodies and the care for human life. In recent years, a revolution in this knowledge has been driven by research and applied science in athletics, the military, and the performing arts.

At the end of the day, performance is a mindset: the humility of the expert learner. It is the trust in a collective’s ability to perform at its very best by nature of its diversity. It is deep curiosity about human nature, rigor in applying findings. It is a love of humans and what we might be able to do when we are working from the very best of our nature. And it is the wisdom to know that what you can control and what you can’t, with a big appetite for full ownership of what you truly can—a lot of it an inside job.

The Arena is the place for performance, for which we’ve relentlessly trained and practiced.

The place in which we activate, and then see what happens.

About the Author

Alexa Miller is a visual artist, writer, and facilitator by training, she has worked with thought leaders engaged in human-centered paradigm shifts in healthcare for the last two decades. Most known for her arts-based teaching with doctors and study of the role of observation in the diagnostic process, Alexa is an original co-creator of Harvard Medical School’s “Training the Eye: Improving the Art of Physical Diagnosis,” and contributed to the touchstone 2008 Harvard study that measured the impact of visual arts interventions on medical learners. She currently teaches a course on medical uncertainty at Brandeis University and studies high performance mindset through her work at Arena Labs.

Photo credit: Joel Harper