by Stephen T. Messenger
July 7, 2026
This week, we celebrated the Nation’s 250th anniversary. All around the country, it was a great day for friends and family to gather. Like many of us, I participated in a local parade, cooked out, and watched fireworks that night. It’s just the thing to do on the Fourth of July.
Throughout the day, the celebration made me proud of our country and people. By joining in the festivities, I gained a sense of belonging with the other 340 million Americans, partying like E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one.
Independence Day activities are a window into building great culture. If we follow the same pattern at work on a regular basis, we too can build community and a team that grows closer together. Using the Fourth of July model, we should have regular touchpoints to do things together, eat in fellowship, and celebrate our wins.
Culture Is Not Automatic
Many leaders think culture naturally happens. The best ones know they must make it happen.
Edgar Schein, a noted organizational psychologist who specialized in culture, explained the importance of creating a community of people with the same assumptions and beliefs. He talked about an increasing three-tiered model of organizational culture that moves down like layers of an iceberg: artifacts and behaviors, espoused values, and underlying assumptions.
Underlying assumptions are what cannot be seen and are below the surface, deeply held beliefs that the group silently agrees upon and enforces with one another. While this bedrock is the deepest root of culture, most organizations struggle to achieve even the first, most visible level of artifacts and behaviors.
In the most basic stage of culture building, artifacts are the outward and visible signs of a group’s culture. They consist of things like what we do together, when and where we gather, and the events we celebrate.
Any organization looking to improve or build culture should start here. The Fourth of July provides a good three-step model for this.
What We Do Together
Independence Day is known for parades. There is no official count of them across the country, it’s safe to estimate they are in the hundreds. Cody, Wyoming, puts on three parades alone. Bristol, Rhode Island, has held its parade annually since 1785. Tampa, Florida, hosts a boat parade. My parents’ neighborhood decorates golf carts and drives around the roads for each other.
Culture is about what we do together. It’s about bringing people to the same place to participate in something meaningful. Parades do that. So can workplaces. Every time we gather a group of people at the office, there is a chance to build or lose culture.
When we host a terrible meeting that everyone dreads, culture drops. But we can intentionally design workplace “parades” that raise it up. Think about your organization’s unique traditions, such as a high-energy annual all-hands kickoff, a distinct way you welcome new hires on day one, or a specific ceremony to honor a teammate’s retirement. These formal or informal events affect our culture-o-meter.
Our group sets a schedule of one weekly meeting and a series of planning offsites. Each meeting has set times and agendas to ensure we stay on track and don’t waste people’s time. If we make our gatherings deliberate and fruitful, we foster a positive culture. Setting a structured agenda for work hours frees up the mental space and time for the team to pivot to the next cultural artifact: eating together.
When and Where We Gather
A second staple of the Fourth of July is the American cookout. Over 74 million Americans plan to grill that weekend with over 150 million hot dogs eaten. Five percent of America’s annual beer intake comes on that weekend, which is about 68 million cases of beer. Bottom line: this is a holiday for food and friends.
Barbecue has roots dating back thousands of years when communities gathered to cook meat over an open fire. Now, firing up the grill puts out that sweet aroma that we can smell houses away, and group gatherings invite laughter, fellowship, memories, and camaraderie.
This experience goes beyond Independence Day and permeates the workplace. People who willingly eat together at lunch form deeper bonds than those who hole up in their private spaces and munch away while doomscrolling. By disrupting the lunch-at-the-desk habit, we capitalize on an existing event that is typically considered a social activity.
By firing up the proverbial grill at work and inviting our coworkers to eat together, we form cultural bonds that transcend the meal. Even in a hybrid or remote environment, smart leaders can fire up a digital grill by scheduling a bi-weekly virtual coffee hour where work-talk is strictly off-limits, or by creating a dedicated chat channel just for sharing weekend highlights.
These activities increase trust and build connections that we miss in the daily grind. Culture is mainly about connections, which can be easily built at lunch, creating a shared bond that sets the stage for grander moments of collective celebration.
The Events We Celebrate
The first Independence Day fireworks show was July 4, 1777, in Philadelphia. Today, our country spends over $2 billion on fireworks and lights about 175 million pounds, about the power of 200,000 lightning bolts!
In our small neighborhood, we sat watching an incredible, local fireworks display. Every year, the community pools money and has now hired a professional to set them off. We gather as one to celebrate our Nation’s birth with loud noises and bright lights, exploding in the sky.
It’s fun to cheer and gasp in unison. The collective approval is noticeable across generations, families, and strangers. This is the heart of culture, a group of independent people coming together as one. In the workplace, it’s up to us to create opportunities to celebrate the achievements of one another, and it doesn’t have to be hard.
A few simple activities like knowing everyone’s birthday, hosting a quarterly potluck, and routinely handing out awards are important for building culture. Schein calls these rituals and ceremonies that recognize both hard work and life milestones. When an organization accidentally ignores an employee’s birthday, it’s a massive cultural downer. But casually celebrating little things like that is a small game-changer.
It Doesn’t Take Much to Build Culture
Many people make culture out to be an incredibly complicated endeavor that requires infinite focus to the point we don’t even want to get started. In reality, the first steps are fairly simple to create an environment where people feel focused, valued, and important. Fourth of July celebrations give us a good framework through parades, barbecues, and fireworks.
By deliberately scheduling meaningful gatherings, lighting the proverbial workplace grill, and loudly celebrating wins, we move our teams past basic behaviors and straight into a deeply shared culture. These three simple starting blocks go a long way toward building a culture and forming teams that want to succeed together.
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