Same Team, Different Ways of Connecting
What a Dodgers dinner in Tokyo can teach us about building working relationships
Imagine joining a new sport organization. You know your job. You are prepared to work hard. You want to get along with your colleagues. But getting to know them feels surprisingly difficult. You ask about someone's weekend, and the conversation ends quickly. You wait for your supervisor to approach you, while your supervisor waits for you to take the initiative. Someone invites you to dinner, and you wonder if it is a social invitation or part of the job. Nobody has done anything wrong. You may be working from different expectations about how professional relationships develop.
A different kind of team gathering
During the Dodgers' March 2025 trip to Tokyo, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki organized a private team dinner featuring sushi and yakitori. Reporting described a tuna-cutting demonstration and teammates trying local foods together. The gathering was part of the teams' effort to build connections during its season-opening trip, and players and manager Dave Roberts spoke positively about the experience (Haris, 2025). For sport managers, the interesting question extends beyond the menu: How do you create opportunities for people to connect when they may have different expectations about what connecting looks like?
The relationship rules we rarely explain
We often treat our approach to getting acquainted as common sense: be friendly, ask questions, show interest, and spend time together. But when we really think about it, what counts as friendly? Which questions show interest, and which feel intrusive? Does spending time together mean lunch during work or an invitation after hours? There are six elements that help explain these expectations: place, power, purpose, privacy, presence, and pacing (Molinsky & Hahn, 2024). These elements give us questions to investigate without telling us how a person will behave.
Where (and with whom) do relationships develop?
The first element is place: where people expect relationship building to happen. Some colleagues connect through brief conversations during the workday, while others find it easier to get acquainted over a shared meal or activity. The Tokyo dinner gives us a concrete example of creating a setting outside the playing field where teammates could spend time together. The useful question here is what a particular setting makes possible, and if the people involved experience it as an opportunity to connect.
The second element is power: how authority and status influence who approaches whom. Imagine a new athletic department employee who waits for a senior administrator to initiate conversation. The administrator might interpret that distance as a lack of interest, and the employee might see waiting as respectful. Both could leave the interaction with an inaccurate impression of the other person. Before deciding someone is disengaged, we could ask what they believe is appropriate and make our own expectations clearer.
What are we trying to build?
The third element is purpose. One person hopes colleagues will become close friends, while another wants a warm, dependable working relationship and prefers to keep their personal life separate. Both may care deeply about doing good work, even though they want different things from their workplace relationships. This matters when organizations promote a particular social style as evidence of commitment. If someone leaves promptly after a shift, what do we actually know about their dedication? Their willingness to socialize is only one small part of a much larger picture.
The fourth element, privacy, asks what people feel comfortable sharing. Questions about family, relationships, or personal history can feel welcoming to one person and premature to another. A manager can offer opportunities to connect without requiring personal disclosure, leaving people room to decide wha they want colleagues to know. Asking what someone enjoys about their work may open a conversation while allowing them to choose what else to share. The goal is to express interest while respecting boundaries different from our own.
Friendly does not always look the same
The fifth element is presence: how people present themselves when getting acquainted. A relaxed tone, jokes, and immediate familiarity may communicate warm. A more formal manner may communicate respect or seriousness. The difficulty comes when we interpret our preferred style as the only sincere one. Consider a new volunteer who is quiet during introductions but helps everyone prepare. Before concluding they are unfriendly, notice the different ways they contribute and consider if their actions communicate interest more clearly than their conversation does.
The sixth element is pacing: how quickly people expect familiarity and trust to develop. Some poeple feel comfortable almost immediately. Others need repeated experiences of reliability before opening up. An enjoyable interaction can create an opening, but trust may still depend on what happens after: keeping promises, sharing information, and treating people consistently. A manager who expects instant closeness may overlook a relationship developing gradually. Giving people time can be part of supporting relationships.
Invitations can carry exectations
One advance report described the Dodgers dinner as mandatory (Farkas, 2025). That adds a useful management question: when attendance is expected, how can an organization account for dietary needs, caregiving responsibilities, religious practices, or different levels of comfort with social activities? We can use this example to examine our own decisions about the purpose of a gathering, the information people receive beforehand, and if there could be several ways to participate and build connections.
The lesson is not every organization needs a team dinner. Building working relationships involves expectations we may never have explained, and culture can help us ask better questions about those expectations. Personality, professional role, previous experiences, and organizational expectations deserve attention. Think of someone whose approach to getting acquainted is different from yours. Which element might help you understand the situation: place, power, purpose, privacy, presence, or pacing? Then consider one respectful question you could ask before deciding what their behavior means.
Concepts, meaning, and questions to consider
Place: Where relationship building is expected or welcomed
- Where might this person feel comfortable connecting?
- Who is expecting friendship effective cooperation, or both?
- Are we expecting friendship, effective cooperation, or both?
- Am I leaving the other person control what they disclose?
- Could a different manner communicate respect or interest?
- Am i allowing time for the relationship to grow?
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