Can a job ever be a calling?

You won’t find this in my bio or on my LinkedIn profile, but before I transitioned to a career in advertising, I worked in marketing at Congressional Information Service, supporting the incredibly dedicated library community that we served. Yet in the ten-plus years I’ve called Napa home, I never had occasion to stop by the library. Then one day I thought, “I live here; at the least I should a donate a copy of The Art of Client Service to it.” That prompted a one-mile trek to make a visit.

My interaction with the staff was relatively brief, but it confirmed librarians are both nice and accommodating, relishing any opportunity to be helpful, including the one with me. 

So it is with zookeepers, teachers, nurses, and film/television writers described in The New York Timesstory, “Please Don’t Call My Job a Calling,” where author Simone Stolzoff claims,

“that low pay, unfavorable benefits and poor working conditions are often the sacrifices workers make for the privilege of doing what they love.”

Stolzoff is a former design lead at the global innovation firm IDEO – a firm I know and hold in high regard – who now works on how to make the workplace more human-centered.  To repeat his point: the people working in these occupations are grossly underpaid and often overworked.

What about client service? It has been many years since I oversaw the salaries of the advertising agency Account people with whom I collaborated, but I remember we didn’t pay people, especially those in entry-level positions, as well as we might or should. 

We ask much of our client service people – late evenings, long weekends, extensive daylong and overnight travel, panic-inducing deadlines, the never-ending pressure to solve the problem of the moment – for which we couldn’t compensate people better even if we were inclined to do so, given the constraints placed on us by our clients. They generally wouldn’t pay us more, so we couldn’t pay them more.

According to Ignition Consulting founder Tim Williams,

“Regardless of the type of output offered to clients, agency professionals are delivering four times more of it than just 10 years ago — for the same or less money.”

I’ll take Williams at his word: if it was bad then, it is even worse now. 

Even so, there are a few who excelled at the job; they tend to think of work as less of a job than a calling, the very thing Stolzoff decries.

So, should we refer to a client service job that way? I always thought so, even when my near-entry-level salary nowhere matched the people above me. With few exceptions I loved my colleagues, loved my clients, loved learning how to get better, loved the thrill of new business, loved recovering from setbacks, of which there were many. Even when work sucked – it sucked often – I never abandoned my sense of mission.

When I say, “calling,” I don’t mean the term in a spiritual or religious sense. And I don’t mean satisfying what is a required obligation. For me, a calling is about taking ownership, about coming to the aid of a client or colleague when asked. Especially when they don’t ask.

In truth though, I might not be the best example to cite. I was able to climb the ranks, get promoted and earn more responsibility and the compensation that goes with it, which ultimately led to independence from my overseers, striking out on my own and allowing me to write a book that strives to show the way to others who share my sense of dedication, commitment, and never-quit consistency.

If Stolzoff is right, then it’s a job, nothing more. You should lobby for as much money as you can get, be loyal only to yourself, working as few hours as you possibly can in return.

I pray, however, he is wrong, because otherwise our industry is on the road to extinction, which would be beyond sad for all the clients who rely on agencies, for all the agency people who depend on their clients for their very livelihoods, and for me, someone who steadfastly clings to the notion that work has meaning beyond punching a clock.