The problem client isn’t the problem

A participant in a recent workshop, an account manager, told her practice group about a client who rarely attended their weekly meetings.

The client would respond to emails weeks late, sometimes with a response that changed the direction of the project after a lot of work was done. The account manager described him as a “classic problem client.” 

The account manager’s boss was no help, and she was frustrated to the point of quitting.

In our workshop, she practiced asking the client to change his behavior, but her requests came out more like blame or demands: “You have to stop doing this! You're the one jeopardizing the project!”

After discussing the situation with her practice cohort, she realized that her frustration and dissatisfaction stemmed, not from the client’s behavior, but from the fact that she didn’t know how to ask for what she wanted in an effective way.

So we practiced taking the demand out of her request with behavior/impact language like: “When you don’t respond within a business day, I get frustrated because I don’t know how to interpret your silence. Can we agree now that if you can’t respond within one business day, will you give me a date when you can? This will help the team plan more efficiently.”  

By having difficult conversations effectively, the account manager was ultimately able to stop giving away her power, her agency over her situation. She came to see that she could be the source of change, rather than simply hoping someone else would fix a situation for her.