My boss called yesterday. We were talking about a project which will on balance probably turn out to have been a fruitless endeavor. He was pushing to have all the meeting minutes published sooner rather than later and knowing that I no longer have a dog in the fight rolled out something about 'the mission' as if it were supposed to elevate me above the bullshit. Well I say fuck the mission. The mission changes. Take care of your god damn people. If that is at the center of how you run your organization, you won't have to put together a team every five years to brainstorm a rallying slogan. Taking care of your people means leadership. It means not tolerating people who want to bring their version of Lord of the Flies into your work place. They can get with the program, treat people with respect, or go work somewhere else.
You can't appeal to my sense of mission, I don't have one. At the end of the day, I'm not even sure if most organizations aren't self-licking ice cream cones who have long lost a sense of whether they are relevant and are primarily consumed with increasing their budget and staying alive. They change like people change, primarily in style but not really in substance-they are still fundamentally the same as they ever were. So yea, fuck the mission. The mission or cause or whatever has been helping you get up in the morning can change. A wall falls and you lose your sense of purpose; a plane is crashed into a building and suddenly you wish you had studied Arabic instead of Spanish. I've met very few people actually ate up about the mission. Some once were but then the mission changed or they have creative differences with their organization over execution. I feel sorry for those people because I feel like they built their lives on a foundation of sand. They tell war stories of a time when their skill set was relevant and often speak of a day when the organization will regret not having bench strength for their eclipsed mission. They aren't wrong about that; we will always live to rue the day we stopped developing expertise in one field or another. I don't use salt often but when I need it, and realize I haven't been paying attention to my dwindling supply, I'm caught flat footed. It sucks and so does the flavorless food I prepared without it.
I just hate the way 'mission' rolls off the tongues of the people who no longer actually do the brass tacks mission. The context is often an admonition, a rallying cry, something they invoke to get you do something with a sense of urgency. Give me some credit that I come to work to actually work and give me a fucking break. This is not The Crusades. You'll never go wrong however seeking to take care of the people around you, facilitating and elevating them. It is truly the only thing I care about with regard to any job I do and it has so far served me pretty well. People who worked for me say it's the thing they miss the most. They have and will work with people with greater expertise and skill sets I don't possess but they will have stiff competition finding someone who cares more about taking care of the people taking care of the mission, whatever it is that day.
*EPILOGUE*
I'm sitting here after a long day, sipping seltzer from a wine glass (cause I'm fancy) and thinking about leaving the house at 5 am tomorrow to drive to D.C. for a meeting I'm fairly confident will be useless. It's a bit of a Herculean effort that would be better reserved for something that matters but perhaps I will never have an opportunity to rise to the occasion for something that truly matters or at least not in my current job. I wrote this post this morning a little after 5 am and left it in draft. Returning to it this evening, I would have probably chose less vibrant wording had I started this now instead of a little before 5 am when my sister's alarm went off and she was in the bathroom with her headphones on and couldn't hear it. But on balance it still represents how I feel about the concept of mission. I think it's important to know what you are supposed to do at work, what your organization does, how you do it. Call it mission, call it vision, call it a thesis, the description isn't important because those things are conceptual sound bites. A distillation of your duties with loftier words. No matter what you call it, actual people have to do it so we should take care with them and of them.
That was a tall soapbox but I made it down okay.
3 comments:
"The Mission" is working together in common cause. Corporations, armies, institutions--they're supposed to facilitate relationships, community, and to provide a platform for accomplishment. "Shout for me and I'll shout for you." Like my man Peter Gabriel once said. Sure you sell-out a bit of yourself, but you gain colleagues and hopefully real friendships (Unless everyone's an asshole--like my las job!!!).
Eh...not for me. What you describe above to me is a job description. It's what you come to work for. To elevate it to a cause by calling it a mission is to inject a job with idealism that can only disappoint.
Assholes abide and they are EVERYWHERE. They are at the Red Cross, any church, day care centers... Mission assumes everyone is there to pull together and doesn't really address why we even bother to define or inspire a mission; results/accountability. Managers invoke mission like it does. Mission is a paper tiger.
I want to sell-out a bit of myself. I want to be invested but I don't really want to work with people sold out for the mission. I want to work with people sold out about getting whatever job we have before us done and taking care of one another while we do it. That has been the best thing about any mission I've ever been involved in, the people. The actual missions were often just plain terrible. Huddling for body warmth in a cold airline hanger? Terrible, miserable, awful. The people sharing that with me? Awesome.
Think I see what you're getting at.
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