Joshua Liu

In medical school, a classmate texted me:

“Hey – 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? Because I want to get into this program and I’d love to impress them.”

I was surprised. This was a highly competitive specialty that I had no interest in pursuing.

So I hadn’t done the typical things a student might do 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. I didn’t try to start discussions on the latest research in that specialty to show my enthusiasm.

I asked myself: what did I actually do?

And that’s when I realized what I was mostly doing was putting the team first.

I did whatever I could to help the team mover faster, save time 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 n their preferred format. I would help get the patient and the operating room prepped for surgery. I would literally pick up the trash. I would do it all of this 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 better 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, but while conventional wisdom is for students to stand out by putting themselves in the spotlight, the reality is you could stand out by putting the team first – since many people weren’t doing that.

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. In our Monday All-Hands meetings, we have a ritual called “Shoutouts” where people gives kudos to team members who went out of their way to help them.

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.