Clients: the good, the bad and the cuddly
How might architects get more good clients and fewer bad ones? It begins with curiosity.
Acknowledgement: This post was inspired the brilliant architectural brains on the In Detail Podcast, Kate FitzGerald, Warwick Mihaly and Mick Moloney. If you’re not already listening to this podcast I highly recommend you start now.
In Detail recently dedicated 4 episodes to “client heroes and villains”. It began in me a train of thought on how architects might learn from and reframe their client’s behaviour. What can architects learn from both good and bad client behaviour? How might they use that knowledge to moderate the bad behaviour and inspire more good?
Ideally architects should avoid bad clients, but that’s not always possible. Recognising difficult clients, and the good ones, is a skill and one that architect should develop. It’s why these podcasts are so important — it’s about paying attention and asking the right questions to assist in noticing. So get curious about your clients’ behaviour. What can you see? What do you recognise? What might you learn?
We should acknowledge up front that most clients won’t know they’re behaving badly. They won’t think they’re in the wrong. They’re not doing it to annoy you. They have their own sh!t going on in their world and they’re dealing with it as best they can. Everyone has a noise going on in their head, just like you. This acknowledgement is a moment of sonder:
sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
So pause first, and take a moment to acknowledge that just like you, your client has a lot going on in their head, in their life and you can’t possibly be aware of of it all. We’re all at our most difficult when we’ve got the most going on in our own lives. Working on an architectural project is a lot. We should acknowledge the project takes hard work from both the clients and the architects. It’s especially heightened for those clients who haven’t done it before, intend to do it only once and for their forever home. The point is not to tolerate the bad behaviour but to temper it and even understand it.
Get Michael Lewarne’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It helps to be more intentional in thinking about your clients and their behaviour. Working from a curious and empathetic viewpoint in order to better understand them and their behaviour. With an empathetic perspective start answering some questions about your client.
- How did you enrol them in this process? Are they fully enrolled or is something missing?
- What do they need? Are they not getting it and is it leading to poor behaviour?
- What might you do to support them to modify their behaviour, so that they’re not so annoying?
- Can you modify your behaviour to meet them closer to where they need to be met? (not always a good idea, but worth asking.)
- How might you be responsible, at least in part, for how they’re behaving? What might you need to change in your behaviour?
Sometimes asking “What am I missing here?” can uncover a problem that can change behaviour.
How you start to answer these questions is up to you and your judgement. They might be answered through observation or conversation. A conversation with your client that might start “I’ve noticed…”, “I’m curious about…” and end with “How might I better support you in…?”
Fear is often at the root of many people’s behaviour. If you were to imagine that your clients are afraid, what do you then see and how might you address it?
Analysing the good behaviour is equally valuable. Get curious about the clients that are a joy to work with too. It’s especially important in seeking more “hero” clients. It’s worth asking more questions, especially around your contribution.
- What do they need? What are they getting from you and does that make all the difference?
- How might you have established this relationship in a way that has contributed to the better behaviour? How might you recreate that every time?
- Is your process with this client different? In what way and is it replicable with all clients?
- What is it about how this client came to us that self-selected a better client?
- How am I alleviating their fears?
Knowing the answers to these questions about the good clients, will identify what you might change in the future. How might you cultivate better clients from the outset and potentially avoid accidentally contributing to bad behaviour? It’s not always going to work, but it’s is worth noting you have agency in developing your client’s good behaviour.
What’s clear is that we can’t always control circumstance or improve the how everyone is behaving. Good clients can go bad and visa versa. So instead of thinking of clients as fixed as heroes or villains, how might we reframe the thinking? How might you make the best of all circumstances? How might we consider all behaviour as a gift. A gift to you, the process and to future projects? I’m not being a Pollyanna, there’s always something to learn, iterate and build upon. The trick is to do so with thought and intention.
To be clear in conclusion, we should not tolerate bad clients and especially not bad behaviour. They bring the spirits down. We’re better off without them as they can poison other projects in the office. We need to identify them early and avoid them if possible or be willing to sack them early.
The challenge is to be more curious about your clients and their behaviour. To be more empathetic. Using that frame to identify what you can learn from the good and temper in the bad and encourage (metaphorically) cuddlier clients in the future.
Enjoyed this post? I also put out a fortnightly newsletter that’s useful, it’s a useletter. Sign up over on unmeasured. I’m an architect working on architectural practices. Helping architects rethink and find joy in their practice.
