Top 4 Ways Pharmacy Leaders Can Use Consultants for Strategic Success
Today’s colleges of pharmacy face more complexity than ever before: declining enrollment, shifting accreditation expectations, evolving curricular models, and increasing pressure to demonstrate value and outcomes. It may seem impossible to keep all of the plates spinning in the air with limited resources and fast-approaching deadlines.
Deans and academic leaders are navigating these challenges while balancing internal politics, tight resources, and already stretched teams. At times, even the most capable leadership groups need fresh eyes, expanded bandwidth, or targeted expertise to move forward with confidence.
That’s where consultants come in—not as outsiders with generic answers, but as partners who help accelerate clarity, catalyze change, and deliver next-level results. Culturally, some institutions may have a negative view of consultants and finding the right fit with individuals who share your institutional values can be a challenge.
It’s important to carefully select based on shared values as well as a deep understanding of the nuances of academic pharmacy. With deep experience in faculty development, strategic planning, leadership coaching, and academic operations, a consultant can bring both insight and action to your most pressing priorities.
1. Consultants Help You Make Progress When Time is Short
Key Idea: When urgency meets complexity, outside support creates breathing room and forward motion.
In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni emphasizes that clarity and alignment are the highest-value activities for any leadership team. But clarity requires time—something most academic leaders don’t have in abundance. With all of the competing demands, it may be difficult to even find time in everyone’s schedule to simply get together and brainstorm.
Consultants can move projects forward without placing additional strain on your already overextended faculty or administrative staff. It’s important that you clearly articulate the scope of work so that its explicit which items your team will complete versus the activities to be completed by the consultant.
Try This:
Engage a consultant to facilitate a time-sensitive task force, develop a strategic initiative, or streamline committee outcomes. It starts by prioritizing the upcoming items and deciding which would be most impactful and appropriate for a consultant to facilitate momentum.
Example:
A college hires a consultant to lead a six-week curriculum review sprint—providing structure, facilitation, and synthesis—freeing faculty to focus on teaching and scholarship without compromising progress.
2. Consultants Offer Expertise You May Not Have In-House
Key Idea: Leaders shouldn’t be expected to know everything—but they should know when to bring in someone who does.
Consultants bring specialized, field-tested knowledge that can fill gaps, avoid missteps, and accelerate implementation. Whether it's launching a new leadership initiative or optimizing faculty workload models, the right consultant can make the complex feel achievable. A tip here is to find individuals who truly have knowledge of academic pharmacy or evidence of being able to translate conceptual model across multiple disciplines or professions. Otherwise, you may receive a cookie cutter, generic set of actions that will fall short of delivering the results you need.
Try This:
Use a consultant to bring structured frameworks, coaching tools, or external benchmarking data into your planning process. It starts by prioritizing the most important items for the year and then working backwards so you start the planning in advance to get you plenty of time to achieve your milestones. Then, a consultant can facilitate a work plan with semester sprints, report-outs, and deep dives to ensure the team is meeting critical milestones along the way.
Example:
A dean engages a consultant to help design a professional development framework for department chairs using coaching models aligned with pharmacy education culture and accreditation needs. The consultant can create listening sessions using appreciative inquiry techniques to ensure broad stakeholder engagement.
3. Consultants Help Neutralize Sensitive Issues
Key Idea: An external voice can facilitate honest dialogue and objective analysis.
Consultants can address delicate topics—like program viability, performance gaps, or team dysfunctions—without the political baggage that internal leaders may carry. However, this requires academic leaders to be open and transparent about these potential landmines up front in the planning stage.
Try This:
Use a consultant to lead a program review, facilitate strategic retreats, or conduct stakeholder interviews. This allows a faculty committee to receive comprehensive materials that they can act on in a timely way rather than spending their time conducting the interviews or pulling research on curricular aspects.
Example:
A college brings a consultant to lead confidential listening sessions with faculty and staff as part of a larger change management effort. The result is a set of candid insights that lead to actionable, faculty-supported solutions.
4. Consultants Provide Structure to Unstructured Problems
Key Idea: You don’t need to solve the whole problem on your own—you just need a strong process.
In Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt reminds us that many organizations confuse goals with strategy. A skilled consultant helps you clarify goals, define realistic pathways, and deliver measurable progress.
Try This:
Bring in a consultant to develop a phased roadmap for initiatives like strategic enrollment, leadership succession, or accreditation preparation. They can include important aspects such as a risk analysis, communication plans, or accreditation issues for consideration.
Example:
A consultant partners with a college to develop a three-year action plan to improve faculty retention and leadership pipeline development—complete with timelines, templates, and accountability structures.
Final Thoughts:
Bringing in a consultant isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a hallmark of wise leadership. It’s an investment in momentum, clarity, and capacity.
Whether you're launching a new initiative, navigating transition, or just trying to move forward faster without burning out your team, the right consulting partner can make all the difference.
At EduLead, we don’t just give advice—we help you build systems, align people, and create sustainable results.
Next Steps to Strategic Success Without Overloading Faculty:
Explore our consulting services to bring fresh insight and strategic support to your next challenge. Here are some examples of ways we can support your next-level results:
Facilitate a leadership retreat or team re-alignment workshop
Streamline accreditation preparation with an outside audit or gap analysis
Develop onboarding and coaching programs for new faculty or department chairs
Lead a curriculum mapping or workload model redesign
Coach leadership teams through high-stakes decisions or transitions
LET’S TALK. Schedule a Strategy Session Today.
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