People with a sense of mission in the workplace can be really hard to manage as it turns out. When you work on projects that have only tangential connection with their mission, they might not be motivated. When your projects are not aligned or even falls severely short of their sense of mission, they can cry foul and risk your business. They might have no interest in chasing the short term KPIs or pleasing you as a manager.
And with them, you might risk not getting the exact outcomes you or the organisation desired – especially when the organisation says one thing about their ideals and principles but is trying to do something else. So you might not want these idealists around.
But often, that is the only choice, and they are the only ones worth paying for. There are plenty of talents out there who are brilliant in what they have to do in the short run and deliver on KPIs but lack the sense of mission that the organisation badly needs. Organisations are like humans, and profits can be like good food, mistaken as the raison d’etre of living. People with a clear sense of mission helps put the organisations back on the right track.