I love my clients. Clients pay the bills and keep my life interesting. That is not to say that I appreciate my client’s behavior, but I’m a big enough man to separate the behavior from the company.

I have a longtime client that often jokes that our companies are married and divorce is impossible. They are a very large company and my company is… not as big. The executive team at this company deals directly with me and over the years we have developed protocols for our teams to interact with eachother – just like any reasonable mutually beneficial partnership between companies.

These protocols were usually followed 95% of the time for the last 15-20 years. Recently, it seems that the protocols have gone out the window. It seems like we are operating at about 20% in that regard. It has been giving me headaches lately and I realized that my betrothed company is becoming or has become a tough client.

I’ve seen staff members emailing executives way too much, strategically timed requests, banal requests, finger pointing, and even scapegoating. Most of the time, my team and I are on the receiving end of these shenanigans, which I am ok with as long as we are helping them execute projects better.

Thinking about how to stop the shenanigans for me a little stressed. If handled improperly, there we are a few ways it could play out:

1. We could lose the client
2. We could damage our relationship with the client and make working together very difficult
3. We could accept our place at the receiving end of shenanigans.

Obviously, none of the above options are ideal, so this is going to need some and social engineering. To successfully execute any social engineering strategy, one needs grace, tact, and a plan.

Since I’ve identified thoughtfulness, grace, and social engineering – I’ll build an approach based on these three things.

Tact. I can’t blow the whistle on the offending parties because it would damage my relationship with my client’s team. It may even blow up in my face and result in more scapegoating putting me on thin ice. Also, I’m not the tattle tale type.

Grace. People aren’t generally difficult or flippant unless there is a deeper problem. I find that most people are essentially good and act as rational as their emotions allow. To understand, I’ll need reflect on and understand what is causing this behavior that is giving my team and I grief. After considering the following questions:

What are they trying to achieve?

What fears or frustrations are driving these behaviors?

Why direct this at me?

I’ve come up with the following:

Their company’s main market is in the dumps right now. Several personnel changes were made and my team is dealing with a different team dynamic that may not be aware of the progress we made with their predecessors. They may not see the value we add in the same way.

With the personnel changes and the poor market conditions, they may be worried about job security, company stability, etc. They probably want to impress their managers, executives, and investors.

They probably want to keep their client happy just as I do and since the client isn’t happy (market conditions), they are going to deflect negativity away from them. Holy crap – that is it. They feel threatened and helpless.

Now how to get them feeling empowered?

Social engineering is something we do each day perhaps without realizing it. We keep our lawns mowed which encourages neighbors to follow suit. We give verbal and nonverbal cues such as eye contact that tell others we are paying attention. When someone approaches out work station and starts a conversation, we engage tentatively while continuing to look at our monitor to show that we are busy.

In this case, how can we subtly influence the client’s behavior by acknowledging their frustration verbally and helping them achieve their goals. The plan of action is simple.

1. Acknowledge their frustration
2. Direct the client to the correct contact at my company
3. Redirect responses to the correct contact at the client company
4. Follow-up with the request originator to talk about the request focusing on
   1. Why it was escalated so quickly
   2. What about it was so important
   3. How can we avoid the escalation in the future
   4. Straight up ask them “What can I do to make you look like the star next time, because you recognize this is a problem, I agree with you, lets fix it.”

Right or wrong, this is how my team is approaching this problem. I’ll report back when we see how it worked.

UPDATE! Working with a tough client

It turns out some grace is all that was needed to humanize my team and I. After step 1-3 of redirecting communication to the correct players in the company with some subtle corrective notes such as: “I’d love to dig into this and help you but this is X’s domain and it would be a disservice to you if I handled it,” the client corrected their course on their own.

Further, I had senior people on my side reach out to the ‘offending’ parties on the other side to ask, “What can I do to make you look like the star next time, because you recognize this is a problem, I agree with you, lets fix it.”

The result of those conversations were fruitful. It seems like they recognize that we weren’t underperforming. It also seems like their management wasn’t even on their case, either. Near as I can tell, they were trying to make a stink to make sure their managers knew they were busy with important things.

People are awesome. People are funny. I love what I do.