How To Deal With Conflict In A Healthier Way In Restaurants
By Katy Osuna of Copper & Heat Podcast
Opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the point of view of Best Served. In furtherance of bringing more voices to the table, we are committed to sharing varied thinking throughout the industry.
We haven’t done a great job dealing with conflict in restaurants. A combination of the “leave your shit at the door” mentality and the high-stress and high-speed environment has meant that a lot of us just don’t deal with tension until it explodes out in unhealthy ways.
So how do we go about changing that?
First of all, we need to reframe conflict. “With conflict resolution comes growth and with conflict resolution comes creativity and connection,” says Laura Green, industry professional, therapist, and founder of Healthy Pour. “So conflict isn’t something to shy away from. It can’t always be addressed in the moment, but it has to be addressed at some point.”
Second, we have to address conflict resolution on a company-level. “Recognize that conflict happens,” says Laura. “Get everyone on the same page. We cannot address it in the moment and we can’t get away from each other in the moment.”
Provide your team with the tools to address conflict and empower them to have that open communication with each other, rather than actively upholding the “leave your shit at the door” mentality.
Here are some tips for dealing with conflict in a healthier way.
Challenge your assumptions
When you have to have a tense conversation, ask yourself what assumptions you’re making about the other person. Do you think they’re just out to sabotage you? Do you think they’re just being lazy?
“Come into that conversation with a clean slate in the sense that whatever offended you in the past is in the past. In this conversation I’m going to have a clean slate. I’m not going to come into it upset,” says Rachel Ramsey, owner of Measured HR.
2. Address tension face-to-face and head on
If you come into a conversation ready for a fight, it’s going to get messy really quickly. On the other hand, if you’re so afraid of conflict that you avoid any tough or awkward conversations, it can and will most likely lead to a much bigger issue down the road. So you have to address tension and conflict face-to-face and head on.
Rachel, as the HR manager, had to jump in to help mediate a conflict between two employees because they didn’t do that.
“When we peeled back all the layers and all the drama and all the gossip, neither one of these employees had any problem with one another. It was really just two different personalities and ego. All of these things just created a perfect storm for tension that at the root of it was nothing.”
Rather than addressing the first bit of tension head-on, the two employees gossiped to others about it and built all this resentment until it eventually became a much bigger, explosive issue.
“I feel like we’re often afraid to have these small conversations, but it’s much easier for us to get into these confrontations or screaming matches,” says Rachel. It’s best to just deal with the source of the tension as soon as possible.
3. Pause and deescalate the situation
Sometimes you can’t address the problem in the moment, like if you’re in the middle of service.
In the middle of a fight or argument, when you can feel the emotions are heightened and the conversation is getting out of control, hit the pause button. For example, you could say something like, “Hey, I don’t think right now’s the best time to handle this. Maybe we can talk later once we’re both in a better headspace to talk this out.” You can avoid all the drama and yelling and a lot of the tension by just putting a pin in the conversations and addressing it later once you’re not in the middle of a stressful service. Then you’re both calm and can think more rationally.
4. Have a common goal
Once you’re actually ready to have that conversation you have to go into it with some guiding questions - what do you want out of it? Do you want to be right - or do you want to resolve the conflict?
Remember that you are on the same team. Your goal is to resolve the issue so that you both can go about your jobs without the added stress of dealing with an interpersonal conflict.
5. Avoid the blame game
Each time you have any sort of conflict or tense conversation, you have to think about what your role was in that conversation. Laura recommends asking yourself some of these questions:
“How did I contribute to the escalation of this conflict? What might I have said or done that was not helpful with this communication? Was I communicating effectively? Were there other ways that I could have communicated? Was there another time it could have been brought up?”
What this might look like in an actual conversation is using “I” or “we” statements to avoid the blame game, says Rachel. For example: “I felt anxious when we didn’t get this order out on time” or “I feel really stressed out when I can’t get the prep done because the list isn’t written.”
Centering your experience and how things affect you takes a lot of the blaming out of a conversation and prevents anyone from getting defensive.
“This is different than taking total responsibility, because I think sometimes also what we do is we start taking responsibility for everything even when the responsibility is not ours,” says Laura.
So once you’re actually done with the conversation, no matter how it went, take some time to process the questions Laura recommended earlier. Think about how you contributed to the conflict, what parts went well or didn’t, and how you felt during and after the conflict. It’s really important to give yourself space to do that.
“Once we really start to know how we are engaging in conflict and why… these are all learned things that we can start disrupting in ourselves and coming up with new patterns.”
Katy Osuna is the host and producer of the James Beard award-winning Copper & Heat podcast. She’s been a cook for 9 years and worked in all sorts of places from the 3-starred Michelin restaurant Manresa in Los Gatos CA, to the sustainable meat company Belcampo before starting Copper & Heat. The interviews and content from this article are from episode 2 of Pre-Shift, the third season of Copper & Heat. Copper & Heat explores the unspoken rules and traditions of restaurants through the stories of the people that work in them.
