In this article, Abhishek Singh pursuing Diploma in Entrepreneurship Administration and Business Laws from NUJS, Kolkata, discusses how to handle overbearing and difficult clients.

Be a Business Psychologist

“Deal with ‘Difficult’ Clients, Keep Business Relationships Healthy and Fix the ones which Deteriorate.”

“Love is a tricky thing. We stick with people we deem worth it, and when we seem like it’s too much effort, chances are it isn’t meant to be.”

Haha, I feel like I am acting as a relationship consultant, trying to sort out differences between the estranged couple.

You can’t blame me though; business relationships are a lot like normal relationships. We have a wide array of relationships that we maintain on a daily basis, and it surprises me just how many people immediately assume an air of professionalism or importance the second they expect to deal with a relationship of a professional nature.

I’m writing this to explain how you can do a better job managing your relationship with clients, especially difficult ones, and yet I would encourage you to consistently notice how my advice stands coherent with relationships of a non-professional nature as well, as this would trigger your intuitive thinking and help you come up with unique solutions for yourself when you face similar problems in your professional career.

Before anything, it is of paramount importance to understand that a business relationship, no matter how professional it is, involves human collaboration just like any other relationship you establish or maintain in your daily life. There are two parties who expect some mutual benefit or gratification from each other, thus creating a symbiotic relationship in which both intend to stay happy.

Understanding that simple principle alone brings about an astounding level of clarity in the sense that embodying the same would automatically solve the majority of your problem. Seriously; the entire solution of the problem of handling difficult clients lies in the simple truism stated above.

Another thing to understand is that almost no one in the professional world behaves in an irrational way or holds grudges against another person without a plausible reason. Mostly, there is a very pertinent reason why a client behaves in a way that makes you deem that client ‘difficult’, and it is up to you to adopt a problem solving attitude as opposed to a reactive attitude, because the latter almost never solves the problem; in fact in most cases it worsens it.

Before discussing how to circumvent the problems that these ‘difficult’ clients pose, it is important to understand how a healthy and well rounded attitude on our part can help us avoid being wound up with such a client in the first place.

Be the Best Version of Yourself

All of us are on a personal journey in our own lives. All of us have a vision of who we want to be and on some level, we all believe that we are working towards it.

When it comes to handling clients, there could be a ton of advice that you could gather from the internet or from other experienced people you connect to, but none of that can bring a complete transformation unless you take up the lifelong task of working to be self-disciplined.

How well we manage our professional lives is a very accurate and brutal mirror of how well we manage our entire life, and the better you are at being productive and effective on a daily basis, year by year, the lower are your chances of being overwhelmed with problems like this one because in the end, there are always certain things you can do to solve every single problem you face.

I am currently reading ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen, and I find it to be an amazing resource if you want to learn to be productive while also being stress free so you can perform at optimum levels at everything you do. I highly recommend reading it.

After you get your personal life in order, there are certain habits that you can adopt to make sure that you can minimise the instances you end up facing such problems.

Assess the Other Side

Have you read ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’? You should.

About ten pages in the first lesson, the author discusses how he, at the tender age of 9, was taught by his ‘Rich Dad’ (his best friend’s dad who taught the former how to be financially independent) a tough lesson – working for a pay check is never a sound idea in the long run.

He discusses how Rich Dad thought that working for a simple, material benefit without paying much attention to the surrounding circumstances offering that benefit inhibits free thinking and prevents us from coming up with original, creative and profitable ideas we would be in a position to perceive if only we were more broad minded.

This is a very beautiful lesson, and is fortunately scalable to a higher level of generalisation.

“Getting into a relationship with an agency while keeping in mind only the possible benefits in terms of increase in financial strength; is a fool’s way of bonding. A sound professional treats his own party as a living, breathing organism who has certain characteristics and features, and gives an appreciable amount of importance to how well the other party can compliment them in a professional environment.”

Pick your relationships very carefully, while keeping a sagacious disposition to the prospect of the same.

Once You Love, Give it Your All  

Sometimes being Cheesy does Work

Once you do pick up a partnership with another party, give that relationship your full attention. This will obviously require a fair bit of discipline, but it is worth it. That will necessarily include establishing clear ground rules about what and how you two are going to play your respective parts in the whole venture, anticipating the needs that might arise that you can satisfy from your side beforehand and then doing the needful o preparing a coherent and exhaustive documentation of all the proceedings that you two undertake during the tenure of you two working together to minimise confusion.

Keeping a well-documented journal of every single conversation that you’ve had with the other party is a great idea, because not only will that help you be more accurate and focussed in your work, but it will also help in solving disputes while also avoiding awkwardness to creep in the relationship.

Keep in touch with the other party and talk about their expectation and perceptions regularly. Just like a social relationship, a professional relationship will fare much better if both sides care about the other side enough to want to understand the other side’s thinking and mitigate any differences discovered subsequently.

This will also help both sides avoiding setting unreasonable expectations and focussing on getting the work done sans the unnecessary hurdles caused by a communication gap.

Even if you exercise due caution and do everything you’re supposed to do in your personal and professional sphere to the T, you might still wind up with a client you’re facing troubling differences with.  When that happens, it is very important to ascertain what the core issue is; what exactly is the source of the differences between you two.

There could be a ton of Differences, but generally, the problem is either of the following three:-

1. Anxiety

In your professional career, no matter what your job is chances are you will come across clients from a variety of spheres of life, and every one of them wants to do a great. However, handling the ambition and the restlessness that comes with it is not everyone’s cup of tea, and some become extremely anxious and cynical, expecting things to start fall apart at any minute.

This is why these kind of ‘difficult’ clients are the ones, who called in incessantly, confirm every single piece of information multiple times and ask a ton of irrelevant questions that stem purely out of their own insecurities and not general doubts.

2. Distrust

No one in this world is liked equally by everyone else. People fit in perfectly with some people while the same people face a ton of difficulties relating or being comfortable with the other person. This lack of trust could stem out of their inhibitions about a certain part of your technical expertise or even a discouraging review that they have heard about your general disposition towards the different elements of your work or personal environment. These are the kind of people who would constantly ask for feedback as to how you’re carrying out the different parts of your task, thus creating an atmosphere where they end up validating or striking down your every development even if their judgement might not be based on sound reasoning.

3. Condescension

Some people are just the worst at collaboration. They believe they have read a little bit of everything (which is actually an amazing accomplishment; and one that’s sorely needed in the modern world) but they start assuming that the entire world needs a bit of advice on how to do their work by these people. These are the people who will continuously ask you to do things that are daily activities for you (and hence know a lot about practically) in a way that I ‘optimised for maximum efficiency’. I highly stress the need of adopting an attitude wherein you appreciate all opinions regardless of the source, but these people have a habit of behaving in a way that makes you feel like you’re being put down.

There could be other reasons as well, but majority of differences generally stem out of these three problems. To deal with such problems, there are some things one can do to salvage the situation.

Pick your Fights

Before you do anything, you need to make absolutely sure that the problem isn’t one that isn’t fundamentally unsolvable by you. If it is, it would probably be a better idea to hand over the client to someone who is in a better position to handle the client.

For example, if the client has a personal grudge against you, or your ad his style of working are polar opposites, both you and the client would be much better off separating ways.

Once you make sure that it’s definitely something fixable by you, you can employ a plethora of techniques to deal with the client, keeping in mind the exact reason why you are facing this problem in the first place.

Keep Calm and Fix Things

If you want to deal with clients that should be the banner of your firm’s flag.

As we discussed in the beginning of this article, it is a much better idea to be in a mental state wherein you focus on solving the problem and not reacting to the stimulus that either the other party or the situation sticks to you, because the client is being reactive himself/herself. Once you adopt that methodology, it would be easier for you to identify the core issue and solve it.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind in this regard is to refrain from getting personal. Not only is it highly unprofessional, it is a very weak and juvenile attempt to solve a problem that probably has you overwhelmed. Instead, focus on the issue and hand and avoid holding personal grudges in view of the longer professional perspective.

Ask Harder Questions

No one likes hard questions, but they work.

Thus, that is what you need to do. Whenever you’re having difficulty ascertaining the core issue because of the unwillingness of the client in your conversations, you need to make sure you listen to whatever they have to say fully, intently and sincerely. After you do that, ask harder questions that eventually prevent them from giving you a callous or weak answer and reveals the core issue expressly or impliedly. That is how trained psychologists treat people who are distressed, and that is how you can be your own personal relationship doctor and be good at it.

Find a Middle Ground

After everything is said and done, it is simple. Your ability to stick with your client is depends solely on how far both of you are willing to go to find a middle ground and work things out.

Involve your client in the process; make sure your client is absolutely convinced that whatever you’re doing is the best that can be done to obtain the desired results. Whenever they are in doubt about any component of their or your work which is actually fine, make sure you show compelling evidence as to how that element has no problems with it. As I said before, talk to the client regularly to identify any and all discrepancies as and when they occur.

When either of the parties go wrong, acknowledge the mistake and make sure both of you find ways to reach a fair compromise. That is how you find the middle ground; by collaborating with the other person and by forming a true connection.

Know When to Let Go

Dignity is Everything

You do have a moral duty to be compassionate and understanding, but the world also demands you to be firm and assertive in your actions. Understand the difference between a fair compromise and knuckling under and never let your or your staff’s dignity stoop down to satisfy a single client. If after trying everything you still hit a brick wall, fire the client. You and your staff’s integrity and confidence is the greatest asset that you will ever possess, and no client, no matter how big is not worth compromising it.

Nothing I stated above was rocket science. True, I did research a bit to gather the experts’ views on the issue so that I could create a comprehensive guide for your reference, but all this is still essentially modified ways that you generally undertake to mend relationships in your personal sphere.

I could add thousands of more pages, creating more subsections filled with things you can keep in mind and that still won’t be enough because in this new world, intuitive thinking cannot be substituted. In the end, you will need to be confident and effective enough to come up with unique solutions that improve things to a great extent.

Regardless, the tips and ideologies shared above will push you a lot further this road if you embody them faithfully. Just don’t consider them as the entirety of the situation you need to keep in mind; instead use these as tools and keep an open mind, and I promise, you will find dealing with these clients effortless and fun.