When Bill Marvin was brought in to manage foodservice for the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he knew he'd have to shore up a facility that had gotten a lot of customer complaints. He didn't know, however, that in his first week on the job, he'd have to referee an Olympic-sized conflict between kitchen workers wielding knives.

Morale was low in the Center's kitchen. The seasonality of the facility made for big lulls in the action. There were simply too many cooks — they weren't spoiling the broth, but nearly all of them were having trouble piecing together enough hours to make a living. One day, this pent-up frustration erupted. "A couple of people grabbed French knives and were waving them at each other with some degree of seriousness," recalls Marvin.

Marvin says the typical management response at that point would have been "to fire the people involved, have a staff meeting and put out a memo saying, "'We don't do that around here.'" Instead, he looked beyond the immediate conflict. "The knife fight wasn't the problem; it was a symptom. Of course, I suggested that carving up your co-workers probably isn't a good idea — but it was more than that."

After talking with the kitchen crew, he immediately revamped schedules so the workers got enough hours to live on. That meant letting some kitchen staff go — although not the knife-wielders, interestingly enough. They eventually became two of Marvin's most productive employees. And within three months, the Olympic foodservice facility had become a source of compliments, not complaints.

Marvin took a near-violent conflict and managed it into a net gain for the facility. Instead of getting caught up in kitchen knives and memos, he changed management policies enough to make the problem go away. "Never waste time solving a problem that can be eliminated," says Marvin, who is now director of the Seattle consulting firm Prototype Restaurants.

How well do you manage the dozens of disputes that crop up in the course of running a restaurant? "Conflict is going to happen whenever people care about what they're doing," says Bill Hendricks, director of curriculum for National Seminars Group of Shawnee Mission, Kansas. "The more passionate people are and the more they care, the greater the potential for conflict."

Conflict isn't good or bad

Many of us were raised on the idea that conflict is bad. Not true, say the experts. Despite your temptation to quash conflict whenever it breaks out, you should instead invite it into your normal give-and-take dialogue with employees.

"If you decide as a manager that all conflict is bad, then employees will make sure no bad information gets to you," warns Wolf Rinke, a professional speaker and author based in Clarksville, Maryland. Shutting out reports of friction can mean shutting off a crucial flow of information. "If you don't have conflict, you don't have innovation," says Rinke.

No, conflict itself isn't good or bad — it's just inevitable. Because it's so common in the workplace, however, it does have to be managed. Three principles can help you manage conflict:

1. Prevent employees' conflicts from coloring customers' perceptions of your restaurant.
2. Make conflicts work to your advantage by resolving them in ways that improve the long-term strategies of the restaurant.
3. Set policies that minimize the nagging, negative conflicts that plague poorly run businesses.

Keep focused on customers

No doubt about it, it's awkward for a customer to witness employees fighting. It gives any business an unprofessional appearance. "I think by the time a guest sees it, it can be very damaging," says Rocco Muriale, owner of Muriale's restaurant in Fairmont, West Virginia. As a restaurant owner or manager, you need specific strategies to deal with such situations.

In the heat of the moment, your first inclination upon witnessing a conflict might be to discipline quarreling employees in public, but there's a more important role for the restaurateur or dining-room manager to play: Make contact with nearby customers. If you walk into your employees' argument and try to break it up, "you're likely to get involved in a three-person shouting match in front of the customer," says Rinke. Instead, walking up to the customers gets them away from the argument and lets them know that such embarrassing situations aren't the norm in your establishment.

Hendricks recommends another management tool to help shield customers from awkward situations. He suggests developing a companywide hand signal that means "Let's all go to the back office immediately." The restaurateur or manager can give this signal to employees at any time, just as a baseball coach can tug on an earlobe to secretly give a player the bunt signal. Such an internal communication can quietly head off embarrassing situations before they affect customers' perceptions.

Resolve disputes in a positive way

You've now put out the fire, but how do you prevent further damage? After customers are out of sight, pull two warring employees aside and ask them, "Do you know what impact your behavior had on the customers?" Probe the problem with both employees present, and work with them to promote solutions to their differences.

If you meet with the employees separately to gather information about the conflict, you run the risk of unfairly taking sides with whichever employee is a more persuasive storyteller. In general, managers should strive to limit situations where they merely sit in judgment of employees who are in conflict. Pulling employees together to work toward solutions under a team model is preferable. "The manager should be a coach, not a cop," says Rinke.

When Kathy Flower spots a skirmish between employees in the dining room at Murphy's restaurant in Prescott, Arizona, her first priority is to keep it away from customers. "We want to deal with it in the proper setting, so we say, "Let's get through the rush, and then we'll talk about it.' After the rush, we go into an office or a private dining room" to hash out the details constructively, says Flower, chief operating officer for Murphy's, Inc., which also includes the Gurley Street Grill. Flower says she never ignores conflict, and that "follow-up has to be timely."

But don't go overboard on tough-guy tactics to reduce conflict, advises Marvin. "We often have this idea that "the floggings will continue until morale improves,'" says Marvin, only partly joking. "In a positive, supportive climate, you tend to get teamwork. In an oppressive climate, everything's a problem."

Minimize negative energy

Although much employee conflict is natural and even necessary, you do want to stamp out the insidious, disease-like culture of conflict that plagues poorly run organizations. "This kind of conflict is highly destructive — everybody's jumping down someone else's throat" as a matter of course, says Wolf Rinke.

Such conflict becomes institutionalized because of poor policies or poor behavior examples set by managers. "Places that have a lot of these problems usually have a top-down problem," says Muriale. Ongoing conflicts that are never addressed lead to the very headaches you want to avoid: unnecessary employee turnover and distractions that pull employees away from attention to customer service.

A particular flash point for restaurant conflicts is relations between the front and back of the house. "We will not have one department at odds with another," says Muriale, whose family-run restaurant has been a hallmark of stellar service in the college town of Fairmont for more than 25 years. He takes steps to head off such conflicts at the pass. "I tell cooks point blank: My dining-room staff is in direct contact with the guests, and I can't allow them to be stressed because of words from the chef. It's a high-stress job already."

Muriale says that just beneath the surface of many major employee conflicts are intolerable behaviors such as sexual harassment and racial bias. "What is joking around to some people is serious to others," says Muriale. He's had success in limiting serious conflicts related to those issues by establishing very early on — even when prospective employees come in for interviews — that such behaviors won't be tolerated under any circumstances. The result, he says, is that staffers know management will stick up for an employee who's being harassed. "If they know there have been times people have been relieved of their jobs [for violations], people know they'll be treated with respect," says Muriale.

Accept conflict, learn from it

Never pass up a chance to learn from conflicts by looking at them from an employee's point of view. "Say to yourself, "Here's a good person who's a little lost right now,'" says Bill Marvin. "Nobody wants to be difficult. It's being human."

He reminds managers not to underestimate the effect outside forces have on employees. "For instance, trying to raise three kids as a waitress is hard enough. When two of those kids are sick, you can't help but bring those things in to work with you," he says. Add in the stress of a mealtime rush and a hot kitchen, and it's no wonder restaurants have somewhat more conflict than a Sunday-school class. "When you're in the weeds, that's all there is," says Marvin. And that's when employees — especially those feeling the weight of problems at home — may lose perspective and get caught up in conflicts with other workers.

The wise manager will look a layer beneath such conflicts and generate policies that smooth employees' jobs. Operators and managers would be wise to adopt Marvin's guiding principle on conflict resolution: "Fix the system; don't try to fix the people."

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