Love your clients.

When I would eat lunch in the Ogilvy cafeteria, everyone sat in cliques just like high school.

Some sat with their respective client teams. Some sat with alumnus of the Associates Program. Some sat more or less alone.

But we all shared one common thought: The Client was killing us.

It wasn’t an original thought—it was an idea that had been implanted in our minds unbeknownst to us during our tenure at this monolithic agency. We were taught to believe that The Client was preventing us from doing our best work.

The Client never gave us enough time. The Client prevented us from being paid more. The Client had bad taste and never chose the right direction.

But this was, of course, a farce.

When I first watched Brian Collins presenting work to clients, the thing that struck me the most was his compassion. He earnestly wanted to help them, but he was careful in crafting the things he said in describing the challenges that lay ahead of them.

Advertising is full of bravado, festering under the guise of Expertise and Specialization. You’d often hear phrases like,

“Oh, she’s a genius.”

and,

“He practically invented Information Architecture.”

So it didn’t come as a shock to me when people brought those types of attitudes into client meetings. The overarching sentiment wasn’t compassion, it was dread.

Listen to us, or else. Choose our way, or die.

But Brian sympathized. He asked great questions, and told apropos stories. He never, ever, told a client that what they made looked bad—or something they did was wrong. He’d lead them to that conclusion cleverly, if need be, and the client would bring it up themselves and we’d laugh together.

It was at that moment that it dawned on me:

Clients don’t prevent you—they enable you.

A healthy client relationship fosters trust, reliance, respect, and dignity. I learned to respect a client’s ability to build a business, and to have faith in me, and to teach me what I need to know about their industry in order for me to be able to affect change within it. I learned to love my clients.

Loving your clients is more than just an epiphany, though. It’s a skill, and like any other skill, it needs to be honed through experience and understanding. My ability to assess projects and present work absolutely flourished in honing this new skill—along with a greater opportunity to attain the design responsibilities I always wanted from a client.

Loving my clients taught me to nurture my own talent, and garner a greater respect for my own business as well—taking bigger heed to the passion they have for theirs.

Love your clients. Be kind. A designer’s job is not to tell someone what they’re doing wrong. We must work together with clients to discover what is right.