Discover Practices and Tools To Build Shared Purpose
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define alignment.
- Describe how alignment builds shared purpose.
- Explore alignment practices that strengthen shared purpose.
- Use key tools to build shared purpose.
Alignment Brings Shared Purpose to Life
While inclusion ensures team members treat one another equally, alignment is about ensuring that the people on your team, and those sponsoring the cross-disciplinary collaboration, are ready and willing to help your project succeed. Designers are uniquely positioned to drive effective cross-disciplinary alignment due to their ability to empathize and balance the technical and conceptual. Creating alignment requires listening and asking, not telling. Nothing is more powerful than team members feeling valued and heard.
Alignment is built through empathy and identifying individual motivations in cross-disciplinary teams. This can include understanding if team members are achieving professional goals, expanding their functional expertise, and focusing on personal well-being and passions. As a team, alignment is achieved by uniting those individual motivations into a shared understanding of success. To learn more about the importance of alignment during collaboration, check out the Alignment as a Strategic Craft module in Resources.
Practices to Create Alignment
Use these practices to align your team on a shared purpose during key activities like a project kickoff or design workshops.
- Define criteria for success.
- Establish the conditions for success.
- Identify signals of success.
- Create a shared language.
Let’s dig into each of these practices to learn more.
Define Criteria for Success
Criteria for project success are the standards by which your team determines if the project has been a success. One way to jump-start the conversation is to have every team member write a tweet or a newspaper headline from the future about the project and then share and discuss it.
Questions to guide the conversation are:
- What does success look, feel, and sound like?
- How does this project align with the company’s vision and organizational values?
- How does this project align with my professional goals?
- How will this project make our end users successful?
Once defined by your team, consider posting the criteria in your shared workspace. It’s also a good idea to reference the criteria in team meetings to help guide decisions.
Establish the Conditions for Success
How you achieve success is just as important as establishing success criteria. Creating the conditions for team members to show up as their best selves requires understanding who each team member is, how they like to work, and what values drive their work. Through mental models like the Basadur Profile, teams and individuals learn their working styles related to the innovation process. Innovation is a problem-solving approach where teams recognize a customer challenge and design and provide a breakthrough solution. Then they can use that understanding to establish team agreements on how to support one another.
Identify Signals of Success
As a team, create confidence by identifying signals of success. These are observable behaviors, feedback, data, and other indicators that let you know you are meeting your success criteria. Signals go beyond shared purpose because you can use them as evidence to rationalize decisions and guide experimentation to test out if an idea is working and why.
To identify a signal of success, use your intuition to forecast key behaviors in users, on the team, and from the stakeholders that sponsored the project. Keep in mind that signals aren’t stagnant. Throughout the project, check in to see if you need to add or refine them based on what you discover. Here are key questions to establish signals.
- What behaviors will we observe in users? What will they say, feel, and do?
- What behaviors will we observe on our team? What will we say, feel, and do?
- What behaviors will we observe from leaders? What will they say, feel, and do?
- What are the key behaviors and performance measures we can use to assess success?
Create a Shared Language
When teams understand each other’s disciplines—design or engineering—and the language they use, they alleviate confusion and miscommunication. Creating a team dictionary can be a valuable tool to reinforce clear and productive communication and collaboration. It also provides the freedom for team members to be vulnerable and ask what something means in the spirit of creating a shared team language.
Make time to interview team members, either as a group or individually, to ask questions and learn about their discipline and expertise. During that interview, start a team dictionary by writing down words, definitions, and resources. Share the dictionary with the team, pinning it in your Slack channel or project space, so everyone has the chance to add to it.
Tools to Create Shared Purpose
In addition to the practices above, teams also use key tools during the pre-project kickoff to create a shared purpose by learning more about the team members, and exploring:
- Team agreements
- Working styles
- Personal goals
Team Agreements
The V2MOM is a planning tool that Salesforce uses to track yearly goals. It is an acronym for:
- Vision: What you want to do or achieve.
- Values: Principles and beliefs that help you pursue the vision.
- Methods: Actions and steps to take to get the job done.
- Obstacles: The challenges, problems, and issues you have to overcome to achieve the vision.
- Measures: Measurable results you aim to achieve.
When you combine all five components, you get a detailed map of where you’re going and a compass to direct you there.
During the pre-project kick-off meeting, hold space for team members to share how the project aligns with their V2MOM professional goals. Discuss how the project can help each team member achieve these goals.
Working Styles
You can use a tool like the Basadur Profile—which organizes the innovation process into four stages: generating, conceptualizing, optimizing, and implementing—to better understand individual working styles and preferences. When you know what phase of the innovation process team members prefer, such as someone who favors generating new ideas and another who enjoys implementing them, you can tap into their strengths.
Sharing working styles and preferences may also lead to a conversation on whether team members are early birds or night owls, prefer remote or in-person work together, perform better individually or through collaboration, and how they like to receive encouragement and feedback. After folks share, consider setting agreements for how the team would like to work together based on their preferences.
Personal Goals
Team members can also share photos of what matters to them most outside of work. When teams understand each other’s personal lives and wellbeing, they can better support each other in their professional life.
Ask new team members to share five photos that tell a story of who they are. They can consider pictures of family, hobbies, passion projects, and wellness recharges. Those photos are a jumping-off point to ask questions, learn more about each other, and understand how to make each other successful.
Tools for Team Success
In addition to the tools above, teams can use tools to establish how to succeed together during the pre-project kickoff, including:
- Dare to Lead Values
- Team agreements
Dare to Lead Values
Dare to Lead Values is a tool by Brene Brown to help teams identify common values. Knowing what the team values most in work, relationships, and other commitments helps guide actions, behaviors, and team norms.
Use the Dare to Lead Values during the pre-project kickoff after your team reviews the scope of work and shares their professional and personal goals and working styles. Each team member can start by circling 15 values in the Dare to Lead List and then slowly narrow down to their top two values. Once complete, teams can share and align on what values are most important and why. Those values can be pinned in a team workspace, making the values accessible and easy to reference throughout.
Team Agreements
Team agreements are formal norms for how your team wants to work together. They help teams communicate more effectively, feel connected while working remotely, and respect each team member’s need to rest or be present with family. When teams create agreements, they set themselves up for success so they can run smoothly throughout the project lifecycle.
During a pre-project kickoff meeting, document what team members need to be successful. Discuss any norms or rituals you’d like to establish so everyone can do their best work.
To learn more about how teams use these tools and practices to gain alignment on shared purpose, let’s check in with the core project team at Cloud Kicks.
Cloud Kicks and Shared Purpose
With their project challenge of how to turn customers into brand and product fans amidst supply chain disruptions, the core project team at Cloud Kicks discusses the conditions for success for each of them. This includes creating a team agreement for setting meeting times that accommodate their different working styles, how to work best in a hybrid work environment, and how to make key decisions as a team. They also address Mary’s concern and bias around working with new team members and losing work/life balance, making sure their work schedule gives Mary the time she needs to build family time into her day.
They also move into a discussion about defining criteria for success. To define this, they each share their V2MOM to learn more about each other professionally and personally.
As a result, they discover that they share a number of commonalities and differences, including:
- Vijay and Mary share a passion for mentoring others in their respective fields.
- They each prioritize different methods for decision-making—Vijay focuses on technical feasibility, Erica focuses on user needs and project communication, and Mary prioritizes data.
This means that all three drivers—user needs, technical feasibility, and key data, like metrics on Cloud Kick’s customer retention rate—become a part of the criteria for success.
Setting all three drivers as part of the criteria for success also enables Vijay to address his bias that the technical feasibility is considered earlier in the process and Erica’s bias related to including key stakeholders to review work and provide feedback.
Shared Signals
After defining its criteria for success, the team then identifies the signals of success. This means using the aforementioned guiding questions to pinpoint key behaviors to observe in users. This includes:
- Customers expressing confidence and excitement about their shoe deliveries and tagging Cloud Kicks on social media as they await their new sneakers
- Key performance measures to observe and assess, including decreased number of calls and emails related to shipping/delivery issues to customer service
- Increased Net Promoter Score (NPS) ratings—a customer satisfaction benchmark that measures how likely customers are to recommend Cloud Kicks to a friend
Shared Language
Vijay, Mary, and Erica also begin a team dictionary to capture discipline-specific definitions and resources. This includes a blueprint of Cloud Kicks’s Business Architecture Framework: the processes, templates, and tools Mary uses to build out Cloud Kicks’s business architecture. Erica also compiles a list with links to a few resources for best practices on user-centered design and uses a document type called a RACI spreadsheet to track key stakeholders’ involvement and approvals. And Vijay shares a few key articles outlining the importance of early alignment with technical resources and expertise during prototyping.
To keep sharpening your skills, learn how the Cloud Kicks core project team develops a process to harness team tension and drive cross-disciplinary collaboration success in the module, Predictable Process.