A Surprising Link Between Better Teams and This Ancient Ritual
How a 3,000-year-old tradition can strengthen modern teams.
The key to stronger modern teams is rooted in an ancient tradition...
Birthday parties.
Before you roll your eyes and picture an awkward sheet cake in the breakroom, let’s rewind a few thousand years. The Ancient Egyptians were the first to celebrate “birthdays,” though not the way we do now. These weren’t about cake and candles—they marked the moment a pharaoh was crowned and became a god. That’s right: a divine promotion.
Later, the Greeks placed candles on moon-shaped cakes to honor Artemis, goddess of the moon—the candles mimicked the moon’s glow. The Romans later made birthdays more common, celebrating the birthdates of everyday citizens.
But here’s where it starts to get insightful for us today: Ancient cultures believed birthdays attracted evil spirits. So they surrounded the birthday person with friends, noise, and cheerful distractions to protect them. Thus, the original birthday party was born—not an overindulgence, but a protective, connective ritual.
And today? They still serve a similar purpose: Birthday parties mark existence, strengthen identity, and bind communities. They're a social staple. Not frosting-fueled fluff.
The Hidden Benefits of Birthday Parties
When you attend a birthday party, you don’t just show up for cake—you make what sociologists might call a relational deposit. You’re creating lingering debt—the good kind. Lingering debt is the unspoken emotional “IOU” that sticks around after someone shows up for you. It’s not transactional, but relational. It lingers because it says:
“You matter to me.”
“I’ll show up when it’s your turn.”
“We’re in this together.”
It’s like a social savings account—you deposit presence and kindness, and, over time, that balance builds trust, loyalty, and belonging.
Why Gathering Matters
Birthday parties—and rituals like them—do three magical things:
Gather people in real time.
Celebrate someone publicly.
Create shared experience.
This is why birthday parties still feel sticky in our lives. Even if you barely remember what gift you received, you remember who showed up. That memory becomes part of your social network’s connective tissue. And it’s not just about being appreciated. It’s about being appreciated together. Witnessed. Celebrated. Surrounded. That’s where lingering debt (and deep team connection) is born.
Modern Work Is Crashing the Party
Today’s workplace runs on asynchronous communication—and that’s not all bad. We’ve gained flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to answer emails outside of hours. But we’ve also lost something vital: the real-time rituals that bring us together.
Now:
Projects are passed like digital batons across time zones.
Messages arrive when convenient, not when people are together.
“Happy Workiversary!” shows up in a Slack thread—with no gathering, no moment, no memory.
There’s less presence, more pinging. Less “We’re here,” more “I’ll get to this when I can.”
And when we stop gathering, we stop building lingering debt—those subtle, shared moments that bond teams beyond tasks. No real-time interactions = no relational deposits = no glue.
Asynchronous may keep work moving—but it stalls connection.
3 Simple Ways to Spark Team Connection With Real-Time Rituals
Milestone moments: Host a 20-minute monthly gathering to celebrate birthdays, wins, and anniversaries. Keep it light and invite teammates to share quick shoutouts.
Teammate shuffle: Pair teammates for quick virtual chats. Next meeting, they introduce each other to the group or share what they learned about the other person.
Create team traditions: Let your team invent its own mini-rituals—like “First 5” where the first 5 minutes of every meeting is non-work talk or "Sweet and Sour" where everyone spends one minute each talking about a high and a low from their week. When they create the tradition, they create the connection.
Gather your people.
Spark moments that stick.
Build the kind of team connection that doesn’t fade—it lingers.
As a teamwork keynote speaker and company culture expert, Ryan Jenkins helps companies strengthen teams and cultures through human connection. If you’d like help building Connectable teams and cultures, click here.