The client that hated my work
What leadership looks like when the ground shifts mid-project
Most leadership advice focuses on what to say: the right framework, the right question or the right way to present a decision. That’s useful up to a point. But the moments that actually test whether you can lead tend to arrive without warning, and they don’t care how good your framework is.
A client changes their mind. A new stakeholder walks in with different expectations. The thing your team built, and that everyone agreed was right, is suddenly under scrutiny from someone who wasn’t even there when the decisions were made.
What matters in those moments is not what you know, but whether you can manage and absorb the pressure before it affects your team.
Be the heat shield
In space flight, re-entry is the dangerous part, because friction becomes extreme. The atmosphere doesn’t care that your design is elegant. You always need a heat shield to absorb the heat long enough for everything else to survive the descent.
That’s a useful metaphor for leadership in professional services. Here’s an example from Andrea’s experience:
Halfway through a project, the client lead who had commissioned the work moved into a different role. Their replacement, a newly appointed director, inherited the engagement with none of the context and all of the authority. Within a week, they had reviewed what the team had produced so far and scheduled a call to say they weren’t happy. The work was too strategic, they said. They needed operational detail, implementation timelines and clearer ownership. What they were really saying, though it took a few days to fully understand, was: I didn’t ask for this, I don’t yet trust you, but I need to put my stamp on it.
The team felt it immediately. A more junior colleague had built the core of the deliverable and had been getting positive feedback for weeks. Overnight, that validation disappeared. You could see the energy shift in our conversation, and my colleague started second-guessing their own work and hedging their language, asking for approval on things they would normally just get on with.
My immediate instinct was to get the new lead on a call and walk them through the rationale behind every decision. Essentially, defend the work and show them the evidence trail. That would have been satisfying and completely counterproductive, because the issue was never the quality of the work. The issue was that a new stakeholder needed to feel they had shaped the engagement, and until that happened, nothing our team produced was going to land.
So instead of defending, I absorbed it. I told my colleague that the feedback was manageable and that I’d handle the client relationship while they kept building. Then I went back to the client lead with a different framing: not “here’s why we did what we did,” but “help me understand what success looks like for you.” That gave them room to discuss the engagement on their terms, and provided us with the input we needed to reshape some of the deliverables. Within a fortnight, they were citing the team’s work approvingly in their steering committee updates, including things produced before the change in leadership. This was the same work they had initially pushed back on. They just needed to feel the ownership.
My team never saw most of that, and they didn’t need to. What my colleague needed was enough stability to keep thinking clearly while the ground shifted, and that meant someone had to stand between them and the friction without passing it through.
When ambiguity spikes and uncertainty becomes contagious, someone has to absorb the heat without transferring it. That doesn’t mean suppressing emotion or pretending nothing is happening. It means holding the pressure in a way that protects the team’s ability to think and act.
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It’s all about trajectory
Leadership cannot stay inside your head, because it lives in the social system. And the gap between having a good read on a situation and actually leading through it is larger than most people expect.
Think about what usually happens when a project stalls or a team loses momentum. Most strong performers do the same thing: they analyse harder. They produce a sharper diagnosis of what’s going wrong or build a better deck. These are useful instincts, and in individual-contributor work they tend to get rewarded. But in a leadership moment, the bottleneck is that the group hasn’t converged on what to do about a new challenge, or that the social dynamics (whether internally or with the client) are preventing movement.
The kind of interventions that unblock these situations can sound disappointingly simple. It might be acknowledging a disagreement that everyone can feel but nobody has said out loud. It might be making a provisional call - “let’s go with this for the next two weeks and revisit” - so the team has something to move towards rather than something to keep debating. It might be noticing that the loudest person around us has been driving the conversation and explicitly inviting a person who’s been quiet to weigh in.
None of these moves require you to be especially brilliant. What they do require is that you stay alert and read what the group needs in that moment and to act on it. That’s what focusing on the group’s trajectory means in practice: pursuing the intervention that gets people moving in a direction they can sustain.
Status and charisma can make this easier, but they aren’t the mechanism. You can chair a meeting with full authority and still leave with nothing resolved, because you spent the time presenting your view instead of steering the group towards a decision. Indeed, effective leadership can come from people with no formal authority at all, who simply ask the right question at the right time.
You can be personally insightful and still fail to lead, because sometimes the room doesn’t need your thoughts. It needs an outcome it can live with and a process it can trust.
We have built a toolkit that helps you practise exactly this. It includes development paths for beginners, intermediate and advanced practitioners, tools, AI prompts and frameworks that we use every day.
This article maps to the Leadership section in the toolkit - which is one of five! For the Leadership section, we have four tailored assets:
1️⃣ AI Prompt: Post-Meeting Decision Checklist
2️⃣ Conflict as a Leadership Tool
3️⃣ Diagnostic: Closure, Patience or Avoidance
4️⃣ Act Like a Leader
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This toolkit is part of our full guide on the five superpowers of consultants - the capabilities that consistently separate impactful from merely competent people in high-stakes environments. You can read more about Synthesis, Curiosity, Adaptability, Leadership and Engagement - the SCALE framework - here:
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