Team First Mentality

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Posted By: Healthcare NOW Radio Host March 20, 2024

Joshua Liu, MD

Co-founder & CEO at SeamlessMD
LinkedIn: Joshua Liu
X: @joshuapliu
Co-host: The Digital Patient Podcast
Musings and Insights

What healthcare taught me about a Team-First mentality:

In med school, a classmate texted me:

“I’m on my surgery rotation and the chief resident says you’re the best medical student they’ve ever had. What did you do?”

I was surprised.

This was a competitive specialty that I had no interest in pursuing and I made zero effort to impress.

I didn’t study a lot to showcase my knowledge. I wasn’t overly keen in the operating room to demonstrate my technical potential.

So I asked myself: what did I ACTUALLY do?

That’s when I realized most of what I was doing was simply putting the team first.

I did whatever I could to help the team take good care of patients and get home to their families sooner.

I took initiative to get all the “scut work” done and done well, so the team could spend their time operating at the top of their expertise – performing surgery, managing post-op recovery, etc.

I memorized how the team documented their notes, and wrote all of their notes in their preferred format.

I would literally pick up the trash in the OR.

I would do it all before anyone asked.

And I never complained.

Of course that meant less face time with the surgeons and residents, and losing opportunities to assist with surgeries – but that didn’t matter to me.

To be clear, I was still getting great clinical training. I got to spend lots of time assisting in surgery. I had more opportunities to suture than ever before.

But I would always do what would help the team before satisfying any of my own personal interests.

Whereas other students, especially those trying to get into the specialty, were more focused on getting more face time with the team, more operating room time and trying to stand out.

Why was my approach well-received?

Because ultimately residency programs are high-performing teams, and they too want to “hire” individuals who also put the team first.

It’s counter-intuitive. Conventional wisdom is to stand out by putting yourself in the spotlight. But in high performing teams you stand out by helping the team win.

This lesson has strongly shaped how I think about building our team at SeamlessMD.

Being Team-First is a value we look for in potential team members and that we expect across the organization.

We put the best interests of our company ahead of our individual goals.

We help team members solve problems, even if it doesn’t benefit us individually.

Improving patient care is incredibly hard – whether it’s taking care of patients in the hospital or bringing Digital Health solutions to market.

Prioritizing personal egos and individual interests can lead to misaligned and slow-moving teams.

Achieving big missions like ours in healthcare can only happen if everyone is aligned on being Team-First – so we can move quickly, nimbly and together.

The Digital Patient

The Digital Patient takes an “edu-taining” approach to all things digital patient care. On this show hosts Dr. Joshua Liu, and Alan Sardana talk with healthcare, technology, and innovation leaders about the latest advancements in digital health, trends in digital transformation, and strategies for optimizing the patient experience.