I see the quiet accumulation of effort, individual contributors who became leaders by committing to one another long before the big win. This ideal most resonates with how I’ve built community on every team I’ve been part of.
The first office birthday I learned about came midday. With no time to plan, I convinced my only coworker to join me on a birthday mission. We bought a cake, a card, confetti, and a gluten-free boule of bread as a makeshift gift. I threw the confetti in a conference room, got the team together to literally break bread, and celebrated a teammate in a way that set the tone. We were going to be “birthday people,” I would see to it.
From then on, I’ve brought cards, desserts, decorations, boules and/or loaves of bread for every teammate. What began with four birthdays has grown to fifteen, but the tradition has stuck. Looking back, I now understand that how much effort you put into engaging with your team dictates how well you weather the tough moments. Our rituals created a culture where we trusted one another because we committed to truly being present with each other.
That trust carried us through one of our toughest cases. A client needed damages estimates for a complex IP dispute, and our junior team of two was stretched thin. At 3 a.m., my coworker and I independently adopted the same absurd survival strategy: sleeping in chairs just uncomfortably enough to wake after a 20-minute nap. What got us through was more than grit, it was the culture we had already built together in lighter moments, the birthdays and lunches where we had learned to champion one another. Because we had invested in joy and connection when the stakes were low, we knew how to find levity and resilience when the stakes were high.
At FTI, I’m proud to have established a culture with team check-ins, hour long lunches, and various annual traditions. In high-stress “war rooms,” I take charge of whiteboards and document requests, but I do it with the same enthusiasm I bring to birthdays. Joy, even in the thick of the mundane, becomes infectious. People feel present, mistakes are addressed openly, and ambition compounds into results that often exceed expectations.
That’s what I see in the photo: the exhilaration of effort turned into accomplishment, a team savoring the collective outcome of what each person contributed. It feels like the moment when counsel confirms our report has been accepted by court, including the cheers, the relief, the lightness. It reminds me of the finish line when I have a personal best. There’s individual achievement, but the joy around me is communal.
I hope to find other resilient individuals at Booth and thereafter to continue accomplishing great things alongside others. In the long term, I’ll use the lessons learned from before to build a company of my own, where culture is not an afterthought but the foundation that carries people through uncertainty.
Photo 4 captures my personal ethos. You can succeed alone, but that achievement is much more meaningful when it's shared.