How to Work With Clients Who Can’t Make Up Their Minds

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues–everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

Here’s a roundup of answers to four questions from readers.

I work as a designer and recently have had  clients who cannot make up their minds. I end up going in circles with designs. It feels like an endless game of Whac-a-Mole — they ask for X, I give them X, but now they really want Y, so I give them Y, but actually let’s go back to X, no never mind, let’s do Z, so I give them Z. I really do want these gigs but how do I tell them enough is enough with the redesigns? I find when I work with clients, I have been more compliant because I want the job and when I speak up it’s not always received well — perhaps I’m usually frustrated at that point. How can I be nice and assertive?

The easiest way to handle this going forward is to clearly lay out in your contract how many rounds of revisions are included in the scope of the work (for example, three). Then, when you send the first design, you remind them by saying, “Our contract gives us up to three rounds of revisions at this stage.” And then if they get to three rounds and they’re still revising, you let them know how much additional revisions will cost (even better if you laid that out in the contract too). Or if you want to be especially accommodating, you can say, “I can give you an extra round of revisions for free, but beyond that I’d need to charge you for the additional work.”

It sounds like you don’t have that kind of contract in place now, but you can still set limits — “I can do one more round of revisions after this, but then we’d be outside the scope of the project and I’d need to charge an additional ($X) for further rounds.”

I came into work this morning and one of my employees has her cubical all decorated for Christmas! We are a small office and we all celebrate Christmas… in December. How do I handle this as a manager?

Unless she’s the receptionist and her decorations appear to visitors to be the company’s decorations, handle it by doing nothing. There’s no reason she can’t decorate her cubicle however she wants, assuming it’s not offensive in some way.

As a manager, you want to default to giving your employees the maximum freedom you can, as long as it doesn’t impact their work, other people’s work, or how the team or organization functions overall. There’s no reason you need to intervene here.

I manage a team of 13 people. One of my newest reports was hired in January. He is probably 10-15 years older than me (I’m 30), and he used to manage two people in a role very similar to mine (with a smaller scope) before starting his own business for a few years and now returning to this industry.

There have been a number of issues since he started, but there’s one I don’t know how to broach: He invades my personal space. Whenever he comes into my office for a quick question he walks around to my side of the desk and stands within a foot of me while waiting for an answer. Even worse, in our one-on-one meetings, he takes the chair from the opposite side of my desk and drags it around the side (so he is next to me, instead of directly across). While this was by invitation during the initial training process so that I could show him things on my monitors, that stage has long since passed. I’ve tried asking if he had something to show me or needed me to bring something up on my monitors, and even moving my computer over a foot and piling paperwork so that it’s awkward for him to try to sit there, but it’s become obvious I need to address it directly. Any advice on how I tell him he needs to stay on the other side of my desk?

Just be matter-of-fact about it. Don’t treat it like something you feel super awkward about (which tends to make everyone involved feel more awkward).

The next time he walks around your desk and stands next to you, gesture toward the chair and say, “Take a seat! That way I’m not straining my neck to look at you.” If he says it’s just a quick question and he doesn’t need to sit, then say, “Sure! But why don’t you come around to the front of my desk — it’ll be easier to talk that way.”

The next time he starts to draw a chair over, say right away, “Actually, would you mind sitting across from me, where I had the chair? Now that we don’t need to share the monitor for training, it’s more comfortable for me when we’re right across the desk from each other.”

And if he still pushes it: “I have a bit of a personal space bubble, so please take a seat!”

Is it unprofessional to bring my own coffee (or tea) to external meetings with partners/clients? I feel like there’s a negative connotation to showing up to a meeting with a coffee chain cup, although I really don’t know where I got that idea from. Is it better if I bring my beverage from home in a plain travel mug, or is that also somewhat unprofessional?

There aren’t hard-and-fast rules about this, but in general I’d say it’s fine to do once you have an established business relationship with someone. I wouldn’t do it at a first meeting, because it can come across as overly casual (or as anticipating that they won’t be hospitable enough to offer you a beverage). But once you have a working relationship established, I think it’s fine (and at that point it shouldn’t matter whether you’re carrying a coffee shop cup or your own travel mug from home).