Skills and Motivation: To Go on a Mission, You Need Both

“For a few months now, I finally have a closet for my clothes, a social life without restrictions and I no longer have to sleep with a field radio in bed. However, my body cannot get used to the damp cold of Brussels.” In the past of the life of Maria Sole Zattoni, HR Coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, there is an uninterrupted sequence of humanitarian missions that have taken her around the world, from Congo to Rwanda, from Sudan to Yemen, from India to Iraq. “I was working in Iraq when the pandemic broke out. With the strictures imposed by Covid-19, my job had become even more complicated and I took advantage of the opportunity to return to Europe to work from a more sedentary position. It was not an easy transition and, not having children, I was not exactly in pole position, but I had the skills to fill the role that were needed and this prevailed over other considerations.” Ms Zattoni graduated from Bocconi with a degree in International Law in 2012 and earned a Master in Management of Social Enterprises, Not for Profit Organizations and Cooperatives from SDA Bocconi. Today she challenges herself with a coordinating role that is certainly less adrenaline-filled than action in the field, but no less strategic. “I am part of a team that helps missions and recruiters decide who must be sent out where. I miss life in the field because the proximity to the beneficiary of your work makes this job priceless, but the sense of responsibility remains intact; I have seen what can happen if you let an unsuitable or unprepared person leave on a mission. A lot of energy, time and resources are invested into setting up a good activity, and just one wrong decision can ruin them.”

Living a life on a mission both scares and attracts younger generations and fuels growing interest for professions in the field of international aid and cooperation. “There is a lot of curiosity about this sector and I don’t want to discourage anyone, but I invite young people to consider some aspects carefully,” Zattoni points out. “First of all, once you have taken the path of the non-profit sector, it is not easy to change, because the for-profit world does not always give credit to professionalism gained in the third sector. I have experienced this first hand. There is a rather deep-rooted prejudice: people think that it’s just volunteers or people with low skills that work for NGOs and it’s hard to explain that instead from many points of view, from organization to technology, from administration to resource management, the skills needed are no different from those required by a company.” However, you have to travel a lot abroad, and not just for short periods of time. “And increasingly often in the Southern hemisphere because all major organizations are moving their decision centers closer to the territories where they operate,” Zattoni says. “This aspect calls into question a non-secondary issue: the ability to strike a balance between one’s personal life and affection for loved ones. In the mission compounds, you live in community, you never feel alone, on the contrary, there is no privacy or time for yourself. But it is difficult to build lasting bonds. And sooner or later, with age, there comes a time when you feel a void, or even the need to get closer to your parents who got old while you were far away.”

Likewise, it is necessary to consider the balance between skills and motivations, because neither element is enough on its own. “You don’t go on a mission to find personal salvation or escape,” the executive summarizes. “Motivation and values ​​are important to overcome difficulties, especially at the beginning, when career prospects seem scant and the comparisons with peers working for private companies and law firms can be frustrating. But working a job at a large NGO requires a lot of professionalism and as such it must be treated and analyzed, also to understand what is working well and what is not and needs improvement. In the long term, ideology not only is not enough to work there, but it prevents you from seeing things as they really are.”