What are some effective ways to handle negative feedback from IT consulting clients?

1. Stay Present: Give your full attention to your client when they share feedback. Avoid distractions and show that you're fully engaged in the conversation. 2. Ask for Clarification: Seek to understand by asking follow-up questions. This shows that you value their perspective and are genuinely interested in resolving their concerns.

One of the hardest parts of active listening to “difficult” feedback is staying calm. The client might be saying things you know are false, or might be saying things that you feel are defendable. The critical skill to active listening is Emotional Regulation, so that you can slow down the intense desire to defend yourself, and focus on gathering information to understand what is trying to be communicated.

Receiving negative feedback can be difficult. Most people will shift into a defensive position when faced with someone telling them uncomfortable truths. Being aware of your mind trying to shift into defense is critical to ensuring you can actively listen. If possible, take notes or summarize after the conversation. Validate these with clarification questions or paraphrasing. By having an accurate record of the conversation for later reflection can also help temper your own emotions that may arise from the conflict.

1. Acknowledge Their Input: Start by thanking the person for their feedback. This shows appreciation for their honesty and helps diffuse tension. 2. Propose Solutions: Instead of dwelling on the problem, focus on offering practical solutions. This demonstrates your commitment to improvement and collaboration.

Often times, this difficult feedback is resulting from unclear expectations on the clients part and/or on your deliverables. A good practice at this point is to review initial commitments and the understanding of what they were to identify where the disconnect happened — was it at the specification stage, or the deliverable? Once this is clear—work together (as best as possible) to identify the path forward—what does the client NEED, and when? When can you honestly deliver those things at the level of quality expected?

Once the root cause is known, build an action plan and deliver against it. Revisit periodically and revise as needed. Proactively seek input when new scenarios arise, demonstrate desire to deliver to expected quality.

A good way to re-build trust is to have regular communication with the client during the correction stage. Design with them what regularity they want, and at what level. This may feel tedious, or perhaps even like they are “micro-managing”—but the goal is to rebuild Trust, and sometimes as the contractor, you have to go a little extra to demonstrate your positive intent and your collective capabilities after trust has been negatively impacted.

A critical, and often ignored step, is to do a Post-Mortem on the project. What went well, and what didn’t. Specifically, what were the factors that lead to the Negative Feedback from the client? What processes and procedures need to be updated/modified/added to ensure that this specific feedback is never again needed? The sooner you can identify communication gaps, the stronger you will build your brand, and the easier it will be for you to establish trust with existing and future clients.

Different personality traits will make this step easier or harder. Some folks can let negative experiences roll off their back. The risk with these folks is that they may not implement necessary changes quickly. Other people will dwell on the negative experience. This dwelling might look like blaming the client “oh, they constantly change scope, they are never clear with what they want, and they love to meddle!”. Dwelling might also look like “why do I always…” [Dwelling on either “extrinsic” factors, or “intrinsic” factors]. The dwellers are more likely to make changes, but after a lot of emotional struggle. If you are a “dweller” — you have the opportunity to discover how to recover. A coach is a good resource for that.