Your purpose will influence how you collaborate, and how you collaborate will determine how well you accomplish your purpose. Find out more in this article.
It’s easy to think that how we collaborate is in an entirely different realm than our purpose as an organization or even as a professional. But the truth is that there’s a strong link between the two. So, let’s talk about the intersection between collaboration and purpose.
Collaboration in the Business World
All businesses collaborate. If you’re a solopreneur, you collaborate with clients and other professionals. If you’re a small business, you collaborate internally with your teammates and externally with providers and partners. And if you’re part of a large company, you can add departments and cross-functional teams to the mix.
Usually, collaboration exists to fill a need or a skill gap on both or either side of the partnership. While you may not spend much time thinking about your organization’s purpose as a factor in the relationship, it is. Because purpose – directly or indirectly – drives most of the choices we make.
Let’s suppose you’re working with a web agency to build a new website for your business. Understanding your company’s purpose will help you choose the most effective content, design, and features for your website. For the web agency, their understanding of your purpose will help them create the web experience you want. We call this a shared sense of purpose, and it’s essential to a successful collaboration.
Defining Your Purpose
So, what is your purpose? We could probably spend hours exploring this, but let’s keep it simple. Think about the following questions:
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a freelancer, a CX team member, or a team of one. These three questions will help you keep focused on three critical things: the humans you’re working for, the way you’re meeting their needs, and why that’s important to you – both personally and professionally.
Why Purpose Matters in Collaboration
Keeping your purpose in mind helps you see the bigger picture and helps your team align around shared goals. If you’re working on part of a project, it’s so easy to get immersed in that specific task. You’re thinking about what your team needs, or what this feature needs, etc. You’ve zoomed in.
Purpose helps you zoom back out and think about how this task fits in with a broader picture. You start to think about the needs of your stakeholders, the other departments and teams involved in the project, and even your business partner. And this makes you more adept at giving them what’s necessary for their tasks.
In short, shared purpose makes it easier to work together. You’re all focusing on the same overall goals. There’s less “I” and more “We”. And that goes a long way towards a fruitful and pleasant collaboration.
