You want to keep your clients. Your clients want to be understood. If they see you don't, they will find someone else that do.

I think of myself as an empathic person, who is able to put myself in other peoples shoes. Feel with them, understand where they are coming from. Recently, however, I have started to recognize, that my empathy somehow, for reasons I haven't yet investigated, stops at my clients. Let me clarify: My empathy does extend to the clients employees as humans. But it somehow ends at the client, the business, itself. It's a business... It's a thing, not a human. It is however represented in the clients people, who maintains the business' interests.

In this case I will reduce empathy down to being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes.

This lack of empathic ability towards the business itself, has brought with it, an inability to fully comprehend and integrate within myself, the knowledge of what is important and what is hurtful/harmful to this client. This results in frustrating meetings, missed points of importance, eroded trust and a business relationship that might otherwise be mutually beneficial for even more projects than the current one. It might downright, if not corrected, cost me and my firm, business relations if not curbed and corrected. Let me be clear: There's definitely businesses and people who don't deserve your empathy. If you have such a relation, you should terminate that relationship ASAP, but do realize that you sometimes can't because your livelihood depends on them.

How to empathize with a business

Just like you know, that you should call that friend who lost their mother, or you jeopardize your relationships by being negligent or inconsiderate, so you hurt your business relations by not being thoughtful and able to tell what's important to them.

To understand what is important or harmfull to their business, you gotta have a conversation with them. A conversation about that might simply be initiated by asking "Whats important on the project right now?", or "What are the objectives for this quarter?". But starting a conversation this way, might not even need to happen. A lot of what you need to understand is usually already communicated, and is simply requires that you bring the same attentiveness to meetings and conversation you already bring into you personal relationships. The context and it's implications are of course very different from you personal ones. I think the differences can be reduced to two things: there's money exchanged for deliverables, whether they be goods or services makes no difference. The similarities are, when you think about it, very easy to see: relationships erode if you never check-in or meet, if you breach trust there's less of it, no one appreciates being made to look bad, keep your promises or communicate early if they can't be kept, set clear boundaries (this is not just done contractually, but has to happen as the relationship matures: e.g. the tone at meetings might be unconstructive and what have you), make up when you hurt one another. There's more, but you can think those up for yourself. It's good exercise - trust me.