It’s a collaboration! Understanding the relationship between you, the client, and your professional Interior designer and team, is directly related to the success of your project.
Working with professional services, you could say, is an acquired taste; and, it taps in quite specifically to our skills and our behavior patterns. People are individuals, each unique, and we all have assumptions about each other. Add in that we each have personal tastes and preferences. It is those patterns that can lead a professional services relationship straight into competitive postures. And, that can lead to a stormy journey through an Interior design project.
The privileged role of assisting a client with the process of creating an Interior design that they envision should be a mutually enjoyable adventure. Taking a competitive posture when choices and decisions are needed creates layered conflicts.
Basically, it is important to trust that your Interior designer is committed to helping you develop your Vision. When advice, recommendations and guidance are presented, it is not a pressure to do something “their way,” instead of yours. It’s not a contest of right and wrong! Advice and guidance are proffered, by your professional Interior designer through a complex Interior design matrix driven by knowledge of relevant design elements, and their compatibility. (A short list would include expertise in color harmony, lighting affects, cultural authenticity and “style,” overall.)
Without a mutual trust that includes healthy discussion, open minds for options and respect for differing viewpoints, the decision-making process can become a nightmare. Your Interior design professional is experienced and skilled in diplomacy and in respect for the power of differences. Indeed, part of the enjoyment your Interior designer hopes to present, is the range of different ways your Vision can be achieved – including solutions you may not have considered or even thought possible.
If the process threatens to bog down into confrontations instead of discussions and random arguments instead of productive meetings, your Interior designer may very well take the role of mediator to get the project back on a workable track and to insure the appropriate end goals. And, though sometimes it doesn’t seem so, meetings to resolve what is troubling a process and bogging it down, can be helpful and productive when facilitated by an experienced professional.
One important reason for quickly resolving unwanted competitive behavior is the waste of time, and therefore the waste of money. When the process unnecessarily bogs down the budget is in trouble.
Differences are inevitable – we are individuals after all!
But when those issues rise to the level of “Well! Who’s the boss, anyway?” or sink to the level of tit for tat, such disparagement is a real threat to achieving your Vision goals.
Sometimes clients who are in close relationships, (such as siblings, spouses or business partners) transfer their mutual contentious issues (from other aspects of their lives) into the midst of the Interior design process.
While they may not ideally want to, an Interior designer may recommend pausing – or actually just shelving the project until damaging behavior can be resolved.
The issue of who makes final choices and decisions and who is the authorized person when there is a stalemate, should be decided, clarified and signed off at the front end of the project, in the planning stage.
Sometimes, competition just evolves! No one is trying to be difficult; it just happens. On the other hand, sometimes it’s a real power play – large or small!
Think about the cost of conflict when there are professionals and contractors on the job and on the clock! It truly is not a competition; it’s a collaboration!
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer in private practice for over 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision© in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact him call 707-263-7073; email him at rb@BusinessDesignServices.com or visit www.BusinessDesignServices.com or on Face Book at Business Design Services.
