Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

Martin Luther King Jr

Service has a reputation problem. 

On the one hand, sometime in the 1990s, “service” became another activity that someone could engage in. As a high schooler, we would regularly work on service projects or go on service trips. It sounds noble in theory – resume padding notwithstanding.

Or consider another common “service experience” namely the customer service department.  How many interactions have you had with the service department of a large corporation that felt like actual service? 

For more common, is an interaction with a horrific computerized directory and by the time you yell “REPRESENTATIVE” into the phone, you may get connected with someone who has no idea what your problem is (though you’ve already described it three times).

Service in this setting got demoted to a cost center, a back-office function to be done, not a place where actual value creation occurs.

As consumers, we sense the loss here.  But as humans, arguably the loss goes deeper. Service became something we do for others, primarily the needy and destitute, and only at scheduled times and places. Or it became something that we must endure.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others

Gandhi

Service instead has the opportunity to be so much more, not a resume item or a box to check, instead, it can be a core way of engaging with the world.  Service is far more than just the department that handles complaints when things go bad.

If we can understand this and shift our mentality, I believe we will unlock a path to greater impact and actually greater personal fulfillment.

First though, we need to understand what actually is service?

Service is using your abilities, skills and resources to meet the needs or wants of another, but here is the key – we are all needy. Certainly there are varying degrees of need – someone experiencing homelessness may have an more acute and extreme level of need. But at all times and in all places, our own need, aka our own dependence on others, is a natural fact of the human condition.

While we outgrow the helplessness of an infant, we are no less dependent on others. Who among us grows our own food, sews our own clothes, drills their own oil, etc? The simplest description of an economy could be a system of mutual dependence to address mutual need.

No matter our profession, we are in the business of service to others.

That may sound good in theory, but odds are for many reading this, your day to day may be far removed from customer interaction. The guy loading bags underneath the airplane probably does not interact regularly with the passengers above (and judging from the periodic videos of how they treat the bags a safe assumption to make). Or maybe you are an executive overseeing supply chain management for a manufacturer – same deal – you may be miles away from the actual end consumer of the product produced.

What does service mean for individuals in these circumstances?

While the business itself is providing a service to the end customer, for those involved but not directly, their definition of the “customer” needs to evolve. Organizations themselves are nested layers of service. Each person, process, and department are providing a service to another.

It is then possible for each person to see their job as providing a service to some customer – whether that customer is internal or external. The IT teams providing support – their customer is the employees themselves. The FP&A analyst analyzing a project – providing a service to the end user of the analysis.

Regardless of our role or employer, our vocation is ultimately about serving others. In our series on work, we have considered meaningful work as being in alignment with our natural abilities. The second vector of meaningful work is seeing how our work is in service to others.

This does not mean that we let others trample upon us. In case, the customer is not always right. Service is not slavery, nor is it inferiority. Instead, it is what Horst Schulze, the founder of Ritz-Carlton, describes as “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentleman.” There is a sense of mutual respect that is given from one to the other as service is being performed.

A life devoid of service to others is at the least highly self-limiting – keeping you from experience the joy and pleasure of bringing delight to another. Yet more often, such a life grows more and more inwardly directed. A toxic focus on self creates not only feelings of entitlement, but also a sense of perpetual dissatisfaction with the world’s inability to give you exactly what you want, when you want.

As we consider the work we do, and if we can begin to see our roles in this light and see how we are addressing the needs of others, I believe we will open a pathway to a greater sense of meaning and purpose in our work.