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Rob from Brooklyn Heights asks

I have a purchasing manager who is instrumental in bringing my food costs to target numbers every month. Unfortunately, he doesn't get along with my executive chef. They can barely stand to be in the same room with each other. How can I get these two to put their personal differences aside and focus on hotel business?

The Staffing Doctor answers

Rob, my diagnosis is that you’ve got a classic case of a built-in role conflict made worse by two opposing personality styles. Your chef is motivated to create wonderful high-quality cuisine. And your purchasing manager’s whole reason for being is to achieve the lowest cost numbers. Personality wise, your chef no doubt loves to be in charge and receive praise, while your purchasing manager is likely to get his greatest satisfaction from his ability to hit a precise target.

There are three treatments you can use to turn this one around, and two of them are about as much fun for you as diving into a den of diamondbacks.

1. Get them both off their high horses by making them sit through a meeting where you tell them in detail how important their individual business contributions are—i.e., growing revenues and controlling costs. But make it table-thumpingly clear that no restaurant worth its condiments would succeed for long unless standards were met in both areas.

2. Don’t let them leave that meeting until they come up with a set of food cost target numbers that both of them—and you—can live with. Make them use very specific, menu-level examples in their calculations, insist that they both compromise to reach the final numbers, and set the brackets for those numbers in a range that requires them to be creative.

3. If you really want them to start working together, build an incentive program that gauges food quality (based on customer wow factor) and food cost (based upon the agreed-upon target numbers) and rewards them for surpassing both.