Doctors have to take the Hippocratic Oath, effectively promising to always do what is in their patients’ best interests. Lawyers and other traditional and formal professionals have similar pledges to make before joining organizations like the Bar Association in the USA.
But freelancers have no such Freelancer Oath. Perhaps we should! It would be written more eloquently and elegantly than I could write it, particularly today, but the point would be a variation of the Hippocratic one: to put your client’s interest first.
The reason why this has remained a mainstay of professional ethics since the professions were invented is precisely because it is so hard to maintain. If it were easy, it would be obvious, and everyone would do it, as Portia reminds us: if to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, then chapels would be churches and poor men’s cottages prince’s palaces!
And it may be slightly easier for our cases than for doctors—doctors are likely to be faced with life and death decisions more frequently than graphic designers—but in the real world we’re put in situations in which we need to make constant trade-offs, like the client’s best interest vs. your own.
Easy examples include, “the client has asked me to do something that he doesn’t need, but I’ll be able to bill him a lot of hourlies for it and make more money.” The complex examples can get near infinitely complex.
My preferred solution is to take the “straight shooter” approach and tell them what is in their best interest, but be willing to go along with it, even if they don’t follow my advice. And the best part? Most advice, given by anyone to anyone, is ignored. So, you can both make your peace with yourself for having shared it out loud, and satisfied your own professional standard by telling them what is in their best interest—and still get the best of both worlds by going along with what they will do anyway, regardless of what you say. And, in the off chance they do listen to you, they’ll be better off, because your advice is surely great, right?
But a key component of this strategy is to let the client know that you are doing what is in their best interest. Since so few people do follow this strategy, they will likely assume that you don’t. And their knowing you’re putting them first suddenly becomes an easy way to stand head and shoulders above most others on their team or potentially on their team.
The hard part is conveying that without sounding arrogant. Avoiding arrogance isn’t my specialty so I won’t speculate on how to do that; my strategy, instead, is that a tiny amount of arrogance does come with the package. And an emphasis on the word “tiny.”
