How to protect yourself when a client’s behavior crosses the line
designer toolkit | May 23, 2024
A struggling client took their feelings out on Niki Papadopoulos’s team, motivating the designer to reinforce key boundaries.
There’s plenty of good advice out there about how to treat your clients well—how to listen to their needs, give gifts, forge a connection, provide updates, respect boundaries, and above all, be professional and polite. There are fewer words of wisdom for when the client is the one who needs some professional development.
Designer Niki Papadopoulos faced this scenario a few years ago when a client was stepping wildly out of line. Though there were red flags from the beginning, they were easy to overlook at first. The situation was delicate: a project for a past client who was going through a difficult time after his romantic partner had recently passed away.
For some, building a new home can be healing after a major life change. But sometimes those in the thick of a transition will jump into a renovation just to do something. In those cases, the project often becomes a vehicle for their stress, anxiety and grief—much of which ends up getting passed on to the design firm.
“There’s this difference, I’ve noticed, between ‘I’ve just left a horrible job, I’ve gotten divorced, and I’m looking forward to starting fresh’ and someone who is going through a life change and is like, ‘I need something big to distract me from coping,’” says the designer, a principal at Atlanta-based Williams Papadopoulos Design. This situation was very much the latter.
Early on, the client was rude, demanding and out of line mainly to the designer and her co-principal, Mark Williams, which the duo were initially inclined to let slide. “That was a misstep that we made, tolerating more than we normally would because he was going through this difficult time,” she recalls. “We gave him a lot of grace. Ultimately, it gave him the green light to continue that level of behavior.”
Then, during the construction phase, the client turned verbally abusive toward the firm’s office manager (think: f-bombs galore) over a minor quibble with the project. “This is a team member who is so genuine and kind, and who never says anything bad about anyone,” says Papadopoulos. “And her job is just to relay information. Nothing going on with the project is her fault.”
Turning the firehose of anger from the firm’s principals to its support staff crossed a line. “We had to sit down with him and say, ‘You cannot talk to our people this way.
And if you’re going to continue with that behavior, we are going to have to leave this project,’” she says. “Regardless of what you’re going through in your life, there is always a level of emotion [to a project]. It’s a lot of money. It’s a very intimate situation. Tempers run high. I understand all that, and I can take a lot of it. But at some point, I have to draw a line and say: ‘You cannot talk to me that way. You cannot talk to my people that way. We don’t allow that.’”
In this case, the client apologized. And though a stern talking-to didn’t turn him into a dream collaborator, there were no more explosions at staff members.
Papadopoulos got the project over the finish line, but she also walked away with a much clearer sense of when and how to intervene when a client gets rude. “I learned that you have to do it right away,” she says. “I also started paying closer attention to how people treat us at our initial consultation. Small things: Are they happy we’re here? Do they offer us a glass of water? Are they making us go through the side door? It’s a little bit of a judgment call on the front end, but it’s something that saves everybody on the back end.”
Beyond that, the experience reminded Papadopoulos that, while it’s normal for emotions to occasionally flare up on a long project, designers should never have to bear the burden of toxic behavior: “I can fix your floor plan. I’m not here to fix you.”
This article originally appeared in Spring 2024 issue of Business of Home. Subscribe or become a BOH Insider for more.
