The Hidden Meanings of Toasting
Toasts typically happen in two kinds of settings.
The first is between a client and a salesperson.
When a client toasts the salesperson, it’s not about respect or sharing something good—it’s really about finding out where your line is.
Or, how much weight they hold in your eyes.
Alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen, so if you down the drink, it signals that they’re very important to you—VIP status.
Someone extremely significant.
Because you’re willing to hurt yourself to make them happy.
If they can ask you to go that far, they can make further demands, like a price cut, a kickback, or worse…
The second is within a team—the so-called “team-building” event.
The purpose of drinking together at these gatherings is still to probe the other person’s attitude.
When a subordinate toasts a leader, they’re trying to figure out their standing in the leader’s eyes.
If you’re important enough, the leader will usually finish the drink, because they don’t want to make you feel slighted.
More importantly, if they refuse, it’s like telling everyone in the room that you don’t matter enough.
So to show everyone they value you, they have to drink.
Of course, if you’re not important enough, they’ll just refuse you.
Conversely, when a boss toasts a subordinate, what they’re testing is your bottom line.
At the end of the day, you’re not really drinking alcohol—you’re demonstrating compliance.
Whether you drink at all shows execution; how much you drink shows combat effectiveness.
The boss uses toasts to gauge both.
If you swap the wine for gasoline, the meaning is the same.
It’s just that forcing someone to drink gasoline is too absurd and attracts too much media attention, so alcohol is used as a substitute.
In the boss’s eyes, if you won’t even drink a little wine, how can they expect you to work overtime, go on business trips, or even break the rules with them?
In other words, this is mutual probing—both sides want to know the other’s attitude, their limits, and whether they’re truly “one of us.”
And being “one of us” simply means whether you’re willing to do bad things together.
In a different approach,
Some salesperson in the industry landed a major provincial network deal over three years.
How did they build trust with the other side’s leadership? By drinking every day? No.
By swimming.
The leader loved swimming and working out, so our guy waited for chance encounters—natural, casual. They started exercising together, slowly became friends, and eventually, a procurement chief and a supplier vice president just happened to talk about long-term plans and equipment purchases.
All of this took three full years. In the end, he even picked up a citywide amateur swimming championship along the way.
People love talking about this story because it’s not just a successful business case; more importantly, it’s a model for better culture.
It shows what people aspire to.
You still need some kind of proof of loyalty, but the type of proof is something you can choose.