Learn How Shared Purpose Drives Inclusive Collaboration
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the importance of shared purpose.
- Define unconscious bias.
- Explain the role of unconscious bias in shared purpose.
- Learn how to raise awareness of unconscious bias.
Shared Purpose Makes Work Meaningful
A key step in transforming any group into a high-performing team is shared purpose. Most of us want to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. And as an extension of our professional lives, we want to understand our “why” at work.
For cross-disciplinary collaboration, shared purpose is the common vision and values shared by multiple people and teams. It unites teams with a shared understanding of success and how to achieve it together.
For example, a cross-disciplinary team working on enhancing a suite of products with AI-powered capabilities can unite around the shared vision of how this helps their customers succeed in creating more efficient processes, saving time and funds. This shared purpose becomes the team’s source of meaning and significance in their work. It’s the glue that binds them.
Inclusion Is the Foundation
Inclusion is foundational to shared purpose because it allows teams to create a sense of belonging by ensuring everyone feels valued and heard. Establishing this connection means being aware of unconscious biases that may prevent you from fully connecting with others. Unconscious bias is a tendency to make quick judgments and assessments of people and situations as influenced by your background, cultural environment, and personal experiences.
Our unconscious biases can arise during discussions and cross-disciplinary collaboration during the design process. When you take the time to acknowledge these biases, you create more meaningful and connected relationships with other team members.
As a designer, one way to address unconscious bias and test assumptions is to step back and ask yourself the following questions.
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What biases might I have about this person or this situation from past design projects? For example, you may harbor a bias against the product marketing manager (PMM) because, in past projects, they tended to prioritize marketing goals over the design vision.
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What impact does this have on your team and the design work? If you have this bias with the PMM, how does this affect how other team members interact with the PMM? Do they pick up on your hesitancy and apprehension?
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How can I challenge my preconceived notions and biases about my coworkers or the project? For instance, how can you question and work through your biases with the PMM? Do you need to schedule a 1:1 with them to connect on your project goals and a shared vision?
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What can I learn, and how can I grow from working with diverse voices and perspectives? For example, did this experience with the PMM help you practice and strengthen your communication skills?
Let’s check in with the product and design team at Cloud Kicks to learn how to use these questions to understand your and your team members’ biases.
Cloud Kicks and Unconscious Bias
In the Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration module, you learn about the core project team at Cloud Kicks: Mary Evans, team lead and business process architect; Erica Douglass, community manager; and Vijay Lahiri, developer. Now, as they move further into their cross-disciplinary collaboration with a pre-project kickoff meeting, it’s time to acknowledge and share their biases.
To create a safe space for sharing, Mary, as the team lead, establishes key ground rules. She asks everyone to communicate with empathy and practice curiosity and deep listening. She also requests that the team focus on the observable behaviors and experiences that may have contributed to their biases. She volunteers to go first.
Mary begins by sharing that she prioritizes work/life balance to ensure she feels present and able to fully commit to both areas. In order to do this, she tries to maintain the standard 9 AM to 5 PM working hours schedule. However, her bias, grounded in past project work experiences, is that she loses this balance when she works with new or cross-disciplinary team members because she feels the pressure to prove her work ethic and commitment to the project.
Next, Erica and Vijay share that they hold biases around the process of bringing an idea to market.
Erica shares that she has enthusiastically planned multiple communications campaigns in anticipation of a new product or service, only to end up shelving them because the product never made it to launch. So, she’s apprehensive about a project’s viability when stakeholders are not involved early and often.
Vijay worries that the technical feasibility of a new product or service is often considered too late in the design process, given his past experiences as a developer on design projects. This often leads to a compressed timeline to resolve bugs and technical concerns before product launch.
Biases have been shared. Great work, team! In the next unit, you learn about the key practices and tools to successfully build shared purpose and how using those tools can address the team members’ biases.
Resources