There is a reality of consulting that I don't think gets talked about nearly enough. We don't get to choose how easy or difficult our clients are to work with. We do get to choose how we respond, how we lead, and whether we help them succeed. That distinction matters more than most people realize, and I think it's one of the things that separates someone who is simply good at their craft from someone who is genuinely good at consulting.

Every consultant wants to work with a great client. Someone who knows exactly what they want, communicates clearly, makes decisions quickly, understands the technology, respects our recommendations, and gives us the freedom to do our best work. Occasionally, we get exactly that. But more often, we find ourselves working with people who are trying to solve problems they don't fully understand, navigating pressures we can't always see, and making decisions with incomplete information. Sometimes they change their minds, struggle to articulate what they need, or have unrealistic expectations about what can be accomplished, how long it should take, or what it should cost. And sometimes, frankly, they can be difficult to work with.

None of that changes why we're there.

The Client Doesn't Have to Be Good at Our Job

One of the things I've come to believe after decades in this industry is that we sometimes expect far too much from the people who hire us. We expect them to understand how software gets built, know what information we need, establish priorities, resolve ambiguity, manage scope, and make decisions at precisely the right time. And when they don't, we get frustrated. We talk about how the client doesn't know what they want, how they keep changing direction, or how they don't understand the complexity of what they're asking for.

But think about that for a moment. If they already knew how to navigate all of those things, why would they need us?

Our clients hire us because they need help accomplishing something. They may understand their business incredibly well and still struggle to translate that understanding into a technical solution. They may have a clear vision of the outcome but no idea how to get there, or they may have spent years working within a business process that makes perfect sense to them but is incredibly difficult to explain to someone seeing it for the first time. They may even have strong opinions about how something should work, without understanding the technical implications of those opinions. None of those things are inherently a failure on their part. They are part of the reason they sought outside expertise in the first place.

I think we sometimes forget that the confusion, uncertainty, and ambiguity we encounter are often the very problems we were hired to help resolve. We shouldn't be surprised when a client doesn't arrive with everything figured out, and we certainly shouldn't allow that frustration to become an excuse for not making progress.

Consulting Isn't Just Doing What We're Asked

There is an important difference between being a consultant and simply being someone who completes assigned work, and I think that difference becomes most apparent when things aren't going well. If a client asks us to build something, our responsibility starts with understanding why they believe they need it. If priorities are changing every week, we should help them understand the consequences and establish a path forward. If expectations are unrealistic, we should explain what is possible, what isn't, and what choices are available. And if a project is heading in the wrong direction, we have a responsibility to say something while there is still time to do something about it.

That doesn't mean taking control away from the client or assuming we know their business better than they do. It certainly doesn't mean arguing with them until they agree with us. It means bringing our experience, judgment, and perspective to the conversation, being willing to respectfully disagree, and making difficult conversations easier to have by presenting facts, options, and recommendations rather than frustration.

Sometimes it also means helping a client make a decision we wouldn't have made ourselves. I think this is particularly important because, as engineers, we naturally develop preferences about technology, architecture, process, and the way we believe things should be done. Those preferences can be valuable, and our experience should absolutely inform our recommendations, but our personal preferences cannot become more important than the client's needs. Ultimately, it is their business, their investment, and their future. They are the ones who will be living with the decisions long after our engagement has ended.

Our responsibility is to help them understand the tradeoffs, make informed decisions, and move forward in a way that gives them the best opportunity to succeed.

Frustration Is Not a Strategy

I've seen this happen throughout my career. A project starts to struggle, the client becomes more demanding, priorities shift, decisions take longer than expected, and the team begins to feel that the client is making their job unnecessarily difficult. Slowly, sometimes without anyone even noticing, the conversation changes. Instead of talking about how to solve the problem, people start talking about why the problem exists. Instead of recommending a path forward, they explain why progress is difficult. Instead of taking responsibility for what they can influence, they begin documenting all the things outside their control.

Some of those frustrations may be completely justified. The client may genuinely be contributing to the problem, and there may be decisions, delays, or behaviors that are making the engagement more difficult than it needs to be. But being right about why something is difficult doesn't make the situation any better. A perfectly accurate explanation of why a project is failing is still an explanation of a failing project, and I don't believe our clients hire us simply to become better at explaining why things aren't working.

I think this is where we have to be particularly careful as consultants, because it is incredibly easy to confuse identifying a problem with doing something about it. We can spend hours discussing what the client should have done differently, what information they failed to provide, or why their expectations are unreasonable, and at the end of that conversation, nothing has changed. The same problems exist, the same decisions remain unresolved, and the project is no closer to delivering value.

The more productive questions are what we can do to improve the situation. Can we simplify the decision, make the tradeoffs clearer, introduce structure where there isn't any, or demonstrate progress in a way that builds confidence? Can we identify the one or two things that actually matter and help everyone focus on them? Can we find a way to move forward without waiting for every unknown to be resolved?

Those are consulting questions, and they're far more valuable than another conversation about how difficult the client has become.

Leadership Isn't Something the Client Gives Us

We often talk about wanting to work on big, exciting, difficult problems, and I understand that desire because those are exactly the kinds of problems I've always enjoyed working on myself. But difficult problems rarely arrive neatly organized, with clearly defined requirements, aligned stakeholders, reasonable timelines, and a complete understanding of everything that needs to happen. They come with ambiguity, competing priorities, incomplete information, personalities, constraints, and sometimes a fair amount of chaos. That's part of what makes them difficult.

We can't say we want challenging work and then expect someone else to remove all the challenges before we get started.

I also think we sometimes misunderstand what leadership looks like in a consulting engagement. Leadership doesn't require authority over the client, and it doesn't mean we get to make every decision. It means accepting responsibility for helping move things forward, even when we don't control every variable. We can ask better questions, make uncertainty visible, identify risks before they become emergencies, establish ways to measure progress, and offer recommendations instead of waiting for instructions. We can do all of those things without being confrontational, dismissive, or disrespectful, and in fact, the more difficult the situation becomes, the more important our professionalism becomes.

It's easy to be a great partner when everything is going well, when the client agrees with our recommendations, when the requirements are clear, and when the work is progressing exactly as expected. The real test of our ability as consultants comes when those things aren't true. That's when our experience and judgment should become even more valuable, not less.

And if we find ourselves in a situation where we genuinely don't know how to move forward, that's when we need to ask for help. There is nothing wrong with recognizing that a problem is bigger than our current understanding or that another perspective might help us find a better approach. What concerns me is when people recognize those challenges but allow them to continue without raising their hands, asking for assistance, or making the situation visible while there is still time to do something about it.

Accountability Goes Both Ways

None of this means clients have no responsibilities. They absolutely do. There are decisions only they can make, business priorities only they can establish, information only they can provide, and commitments they need to honor if we're going to succeed together. We should be clear about those responsibilities and hold clients accountable for the things they own, just as we should expect them to hold us accountable for ours.

But accountability isn't about finding someone to blame. It's about making responsibilities visible, communicating when something isn't happening, and helping everyone understand what needs to happen next. If a client isn't making a decision, our responsibility doesn't necessarily end with sending an email asking for one. Have we explained why the decision matters, presented the options, made a recommendation, and helped them understand what happens if the decision is delayed? Have we considered whether there is another way to make progress while we wait, or whether the decision is actually as critical as we initially believed?

And if we've done all of that and the client still chooses not to act, then we need to clearly communicate the consequences and adjust our plan accordingly. There is a point where we have to recognize the limits of our influence, and being a good consultant doesn't mean accepting unlimited responsibility for decisions we don't control. It does mean making sure we've done everything reasonably within our ability to help the client understand the situation and make an informed choice.

We cannot guarantee that every client will make the right decisions, and we cannot guarantee that every engagement will succeed. But we can take responsibility for the quality of our guidance, the clarity of our communication, and the professionalism with which we approach the work.

The Way We Show Up Is Our Choice

At augustwenty, we talk a lot about building valuable things, and I've always believed that means something much broader than simply building software, completing tasks, or delivering what was written in a ticket. It means understanding why someone asked us to be involved in the first place and taking responsibility for helping them achieve the outcome they were looking for.

That requires more than technical ability. It requires patience when someone doesn't understand, curiosity when something doesn't make sense, and the courage to challenge an idea respectfully when we believe there is a better approach. It requires humility to recognize that our preferred solution may not be the right solution for the client, and it requires ownership when things aren't going the way we expected.

It also requires us to remember that there are people on the other side of these engagements. People who have responsibilities to their organizations, expectations from their leadership, budgets to manage, and careers that can be affected by whether a project succeeds or fails. We don't always know what pressures they're facing or what conversations are happening when we're not in the room. That doesn't excuse poor decisions or unreasonable behavior, but I think understanding that perspective can change the way we approach difficult conversations.

I don't believe our responsibility is to make every client happy with every conversation or every recommendation. Sometimes doing the right thing means telling someone something they don't want to hear, pushing back on a request, or explaining why a particular approach is likely to create more problems than it solves. Those conversations are part of the job, and avoiding them simply because they're uncomfortable isn't doing the client any favors.

But we should always be able to explain how our actions were intended to help them succeed. That's the standard I believe we should hold ourselves to. Not whether the client was easy to work with, whether the project went exactly as planned, or whether everyone agreed with our recommendations, but whether we brought our best judgment, communicated clearly, took responsibility for our contribution, and worked to leave the client in a better position than when we arrived.

The Work Is the Work

There will always be difficult clients, unclear requirements, changing priorities, unrealistic expectations, and uncomfortable conversations. We don't get to choose all of those circumstances, and I don't believe we should need ideal circumstances to do excellent work.

What we do get to choose is whether we become part of the frustration or part of the solution. We can wait for someone else to establish direction, or we can step forward and help create it. We can use the difficulty of the situation to explain why progress isn't possible, or we can apply our experience to identify what is possible and help the client move toward it. We can focus on the things outside our control, or we can take responsibility for the things we can influence.

I think this is one of the most important distinctions in consulting, and it's something I believe we need to continually remind ourselves of, especially when an engagement becomes challenging. Our value isn't measured solely by what we can accomplish when everything is working in our favor. A significant part of our value comes from what we contribute when things are uncertain, when the path forward isn't obvious, and when the people around us need someone willing to help make sense of the situation.

We don't get to choose how easy or difficult our clients are to work with. We do get to choose how we respond, how we lead, and whether we help them succeed.

And ultimately, that's what our clients should be able to count on from us, regardless of how difficult the work becomes.