One way to prevent conflict before it starts
Summary: Conflict can consume up to 40% of a manager’s time. Prevention through clear expectations and role clarity is key. When conflicts occur, interest-based negotiation is one way to manage conflict. This approach focuses on finding win-win solutions through active listening and identifying common interests. Effective management reduces conflict's impact, allowing restaurant managers to focus on other priorities.
Being a leader in hospitality means that you not only have to be up to speed on the technical side of your job—aka, know your wines, know food safety regulations, etc.—but also on how to manage your teams and the individuals on them.
One thing that we often hear from restaurant managers and chefs is that managing conflict is a top challenge in their roles. And this makes sense. After all, we are all humans with different experiences, perspectives, and personalities. Put many of us together in a high-stress, high-pressure environment, and conflict is bound to happen at some point.
Even though conflict is inevitable, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take steps to prevent it before it starts.
The truth about conflict at work
We’ve all been there. There’s been disagreement bubbling below the surface between two team members. Maybe they have different communication styles and have struggled to get through to one another. Perhaps they disagree on new menu items and how they should be presented to guests. [Insert a conflict from your experience here].
The truth is that conflict is all around us—that is no surprise. But what might be surprising is that managers report that conflict consumes 40% of their time in the workplace. 40%! That means that managers are spending 40% of their time focused on managing conflict rather than on other priorities that could be supporting the business.
The bottom line is that if we can reduce that number–even if just a little–we would be giving our managers their time back to focus on other things.
Providing clarity to prevent conflict
We know conflict happens and that our managers are spending a lot of time managing it. So, how do we start reducing that number? By preventing conflict before it starts.
There are lots of different triggers to conflict, and we won’t cover all of them here. However, there is one primary trigger that, if addressed, can prevent many conflicts before they even start. That trigger is: clarity of expectations.
Providing clarity around role, task, performance, and expectations can help prevent conflict because it:
removes ambiguity;
communicates your priorities and the priorities of the business; and
lets the team and/or individual know what success looks like.
As leaders, we often skip this crucial step. We move through our days so quickly that we forget to clearly communicate expectations to our employees and teams.
We make assumptions about what other people understand to be their task or role, and when that doesn’t align with reality, it can be a recipe for confusion and disagreement among team members.
Creating clear expectations
If setting clear expectations is key to preventing conflict, how can you create them and communicate them? We suggest starting with these four questions:
Do your people know what is expected of them?
Do your people know what is expected of each other?
Is your employee’s role description clear and not overlapping with others?
Do they know what success looks like?
These are key questions to ask yourself and to also ask your team members. You want to be sure that everyone can confidently answer “yes” to all of these questions.
What to do when conflict does happen
While providing clear expectations can help reduce conflict, it won’t prevent it entirely, as there are many triggers to conflict. And that’s ok. As we mentioned before, conflict is a part of life and working with others.
However, if you can’t prevent conflict between team members, the next best thing is to be able to manage it appropriately and effectively. One of our favorite tools for managing conflict is called “interest-based negotiation,” which focuses on underlying needs and interests rather than positions. With interest-based negotiation, the goal is to find a win-win and maintain a positive relationship.
This approach calls for:
active listening;
identifying common interests;
generating creative solutions; and
using objective criteria to evaluate solutions.
We’ve outlined the interest-based negotiation approach in a worksheet, so you can learn more about it and reference it next time conflict comes up. Grab it below.
Conflict is a part of life and a part of managing people. One way you can prevent conflict is by providing clarity of expectations to your employees and confirming that they heard and understand them. This can go a long way to curbing conflict before it even starts, so your managers can start focusing on their other priorities instead of managing conflict at work.
When conflict does come up, you (and your managers) can try using the interest-based negotiation approach to help both parties identify a win-win and maintain a positive relationship.
