When Clients Don’t Respect You

What a place to find yourself in when you are on the receiving end of an unbalanced relationship. It’s true if you are in a client, service provider relationship and you are the service provider, you are expected to serve your client. To serve means to be others-serving, to help others, to be useful to others, to supply others, and to do it all for the gain and good of the recipient not for self-gain or ego.

When you do a good job at serving your clients and you make yourself irreplaceable, clients tend to rely on you, depend on you, and more often than not, take you for granted. They see the outcome and not the input. Just like when a customer buys a new laptop or someone watches a movie, they don’t see all of the heavy lifting, leg work, time and effort invested on the back end. When a client forgets to acknowledge the efforts that are poured into a final product, a slippery slope paved with a bunch of small inconveniences unravels quickly and when added up, it makes a big impact on the relationship.

The client, service-provider relationship oftentimes includes a scope of work that is meant to protect your (the service providers) time and bandwidth. Boundaries are set up to keep the relationship professional, on course and fruitful. When you find yourself in a happy relationship, the client can trust you more. With more trust, comes more responsibility. Which is a great thing!! So long as there is compensation and time to account for that new responsibility –– otherwise we are dealing with good, old-fashioned scope creep.

Scope creep happens when clear boundaries and milestones are not established early on in the relationship. If a task is too broad than there is cause for caution. It usually starts small, almost unrecognizable and then you find yourself drowning in a deep in a scope of work that has been stretched in every direction. Scope creep looks like growth that is out of control. Whether it be an initially small task transformed into a multi-prong campaign or a project manager now wearing ten different hats; it’s generally harmful and impedes productivity. Beware the scope creep.

There are other issues that can take shape as a byproduct of playing an irreplaceable part in the success story of a client. Sometimes, service providers can become like an unspoken extension or member of their client’s team which can also be quite tricky to navigate. Client’s forget to acknowledge that their marketing partner or outsourced agency is just that: outsourced, a separate entity. These blurred lines can result in inappropriate offline communications, lack of consideration for professional and personal boundaries, and in some of the worst cases, manipulation.

Here is an example of the worst case scenarios (which can take on many forms):

Call scheduled for 9:30am: Email Marketing Strat Call

*9:29am email: *Calendar invite* ‘Hey! Can we move our call to 10:00’
(the implication is that you’re available and your time is not as valuable as they perceive their own to be)

*Cycle repeats on rolling, weekly basis based on the scheduling convenience of one party (the client) and at the inconvenience of another (the service provider)*

Now, I should preface that life happens, things come up, people are not always going to be available and I highly recommend that people account for that; however, if it becomes routine for a client to treat you with inconsideration and low in priority, than that is a problem that needs correcting. If someone does not know how to respect you or your time, teach them.

How do you teach someone to respect you and your time? I am sure if you were to Google this you would find 20+ articles that would tell you that ‘you deserve it’ ‘your worth it’ when really, we are past that point. We know this. Our work validates our time and efforts. So, the way you do it is by simply setting an example. Showcase how valuable your time and efforts are to you in your behavior and in your day-to-day interactions. Leverage proper time management and scheduling skills, set reminders, draw hard boundaries and respect them, speak up and be considerate, allow people to save face and give them escape routes when needed. In short, be the bigger person.

You were told once to treat others the way you want to be treated. This was and forever will be a golden rule. So lead by example and make your parents proud by honoring their wisdom. If you have expectations for how you should be treated, and you should, be uncompromising in them and the way you do that is by paradoxically treating them they way that you expect to be treated. In this way, you are teaching them how to respect you and you will reap what you sow. It may require patience, but the juice is worth the squeeze.