Mission given means mission accomplished! 

Roberto Trigueiro Fontes

I very much enjoy the expression: ‘‘mission given means mission accomplished''. It obviously reminds us of a military idea, armed forces, those places that many of us have never met (myself, for instance, has never served the Armed Forces; I was in the so called ‘‘excess contingency'') and some of us who have known try to forget. However, many of the lessons that are kept through a lifetime are from that period; that time in which the young is still trying to impose his ideas without realizing the consequences that can result in those around him.

In that sense, women ‘‘escape'' from this compulsory teaching, even though it is true that life itself teaches all of us to live in an environment in which hierarchy and respect precede many other principles, and that results in help improving the formation of anyone.

Certainly, there must be several persons who do not agree with this kind of doctrine, but if we stop to ponder a little, we can even conclude that it is no as arbitrary as one might think it is.

Imagine yourself in a working environment in which your superior hierarchic answers before someone even more superior for the accomplishments of your team. If every time something is scheduled to be done a question by a member of the team comes up, it is reasonable to agree that there is no command. Therefore, we take the premises that everything ordered has to be fully accomplished. However, and if there are wrong of absurd orders? Well, the system itself will be in charge of punishing the bad leader, since he has responsibilities before his superiors and before the company's directors.

Bearing that in mind, when it is said that a mission given means a mission accomplished, it signifies that the team must not be questioning every single determination. I insist again in the point that the results will speak for themselves in the hypothesis of the order being mistaken.

In this topic, it is important to clarify that I speak about strategic matters, never about ethical issues. Therefore, if a determination violates a company's police or a employee's ethics, it must be shouted to the four winds, not leaving it for later, when there can no longer be pleaded unknowing of the determination or exemption of the responsibility.

Thus, concerning specifically work issues, do what has to be done is anyone's and everyone's daily goal.

Much is said about the Spartans, who built the probably most organized and violent army in Classic Antiquity, and whose model could very well be the idea we now discuss. However, there is another example of determination that goes beyond any reasonable limits, but serves as an illustration for the context of our analysis. I draw your attention to transcript below the speech given by Hernan Cortez, in the XVI century, before conquering the Aztec Empire:

“Soldiers of Spain ! Before everything thy have to fight! The ships, I sent them to be sunk, so that thy hopes in returning are stripped. Thy have to fight with the weapons in thy hands. And if in combat they are to be broken, then it shall be with fists and feet that the fight shall continue. And if thy arms are broken, along with thy legs, forget not thy teeth. And if having done all that, death comes; even then thy last act of devotion shall not have been fulfilled, no! It is necessary that the stench from thy corpses floods the air and makes it impossible for the enemies of Spain to draw a breath. Head forth, for God and for Santiago ”.

Cortez was ahead of four hundred men, with 12 horses, armed with 32 shoot guns and four cannons, plus the aid of a few allied tribes. He defeated an army of 500 thousand men and annihilated the Aztec Empire, conquering Mexico .

In a more recent time, we can remember that Winston Churchill was just the right person to face Hitler's unmatchable power, in the occasion of the 2st World War. He had an astonishing determination and knew, like no other leader in his time, just how to draw until the last drop the blood that ran through the veins of his combatants. When he received the mission of heading the Parliament, he addressed to the British people saying he had nothing to offer to them but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. His mission was hard, especially at the moment it was handed out to him, but the huge difficulties and the unbearable challenges are exactly why the great politician managed to transpose the obstacles and accomplish his mission.

Churchill once said, as a tribute to the men of the British Royal Air Force, that “n ever in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few ”. The struggle as unequal, but the given mission had to be accomplished. And so it was!

No need for the extremes of a war, but focused on the idea that much is to professionally be learned with true leaders, even to the point of being able to become one of them, lays the notion that questions have their appropriate time to become public and that the fulfillment of the task at hand is primordial so that a working team can be considered victorious in what it does.