By Catherine Adenle
To stand out in today’s rapidly changing business environment, you have to know how to innovate and impress at work. You need to be seen as bringing ideas to the table that solve a problem or stem a challenge that’s hemorrhaging the organizations’ financial resources or chipping away at their carefully built brand. According to a study by IBM, “About 60% of CEOs polled cited creativity as the most important leadership quality, compared with 52% for integrity and 35% for global thinking.”
“About 60% of CEOs polled cited creativity as the most important leadership quality, compared with 52% for integrity and 35% for global thinking.”
If you haven’t noticed, everyone is looking for different ways to become more efficient, add value and be effective in their thinking at work. One of the best ways to add value at work is to be highly effective in your thinking. Meaningful creativity and innovation will truly set you aside at work. However, you have to allow your thinking to be solutions focused.
To foster a creative work environment for yourself, you need to explore what the pain points are at work for your customers, the services your organization provides and the challenges your colleagues face. Then, set some time aside or make yourself a part of a nimble team to find creative solutions to solve these challenges one by one.
Whether you know it or not, your brain is a marvellous computer that has evolved for you to be able to come up with great ideas, thoughts and how to build sophisticated relationships. As well as you can come up with creative ideas, you also have complex interactions with various people every day at work. Your thinking at work and your livelihood depends on these interactions. As we are fundamentally geared to relate frequently and deeply with our tribe in the universe and workplace sphere, it is vital to learn what you can help to create or innovate as an individual or as part of a team to solve the challenges in your workplace – this allows you to innovate and impress at work.
“An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it”. — Bill Bernbach, co-founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach
In order to innovate and impress at work, enjoying your work or having fun with what you do is a big part of what you need to be creative at your work environment. Candidly, humor makes up an essential part of effective thinking; and is the one major aspect of creativity. It will let you break away from the usual predictable way of thinking which would open up the gates for you to come up with unconventional and innovative solutions as an individual or as part of a team.
Remember, being creative or innovative within a your team or organization is a sure path to success for you. These days, learning to stimulate your own creativity and explore completely new and unknown territories can lead to increase in productivity for you and also provide a competitive edge for your organisation. Now, if that doesn’t impress your manager, team or organization, then you may be in the wrong organization.
Allowing yourself to think outside of the box and give yourself time, tools and the resources to help you explore new areas for innovative ideas is a major way to value adding, cost-effective and productive business solutions.
Infographic: 10 Ways to Innovate and Impress at Work
See 100 Ways to Be More Creative at Work
To innovative and impress at work, the more you create solutions to ongoing challenges at work, the better your process of solving problems becomes easy. It doesn’t matter if you tackle the development of a new strategy or find an innovative way to stay ahead of the competition. Creative problem solving gives you that competitive edge that you need to innovative and shine at work.
See The Power of Small Wins at Work
As there are numerous ways to innovate and impress at work, can you share these other ways with us in the comments box or just share your thoughts on the Infographic and its content.
Yeah thats right stand out from the crowd, what I do is I always slightly misalign one facing, on the shelf to draw the consumers eye, that way my shelves products might move out a little bit faster. As they say work smarter not faster.
It is agreat tool to learn how to be effective, innovative and efficient in the office where i work. Thank you for making this stuff available.