To stand out in today’s rapidly changing business environment, you have to know how to innovate and impress at work.

“About 60% of CEOs polled cited creativity as the most important leadership quality, compared with 52% for integrity and 35% for global thinking.”

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. Frankly, 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.

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.

10 Ways to Innovate and Impress at Work

• Turn the works, “I can’t” to “I can”

You are the only as innovate as you allow yourself to be. Be bold with coming up with creative ways to get rid of challenges at work.

• Turbocharge your “psychological creativity muscle” and catapult yourself into problem solving mode.

Don’t wait to be confronted with problems before coming up with solutions. Look for what is not working well and come up with an innovative solution to improve it.

• Collaborate and access available assets

Realize that no man is an island. You can never innovate alone in an organization. You need support, buy-in and a change of behavior for any innovation to succeed. Collaborate and widen your network.

• Be persistent

Believe in yourself and your ideas. Once you have any innovative idea nailed down, be laser sharpe focused to do what it takes to achieve and an end result that you envisioned.

• Identify potential bottleneck

Why shouldn’t they buy into your innovative solution? Before you sell your innovative idea, give end users a very good reason why they need the innovation that you are pushing!

• Outside the box is where you want to be in order to be innovative

To innovate and impress at work, be sure to think outside the box but aim to present your idea inside the box!

• Take risks and be ready to fail or make mistakes

Certain amount of risk-taking or failure is inevitable with any innovation. Allow yourself to learn from your mistakes. Never be put off creativity by penalizing yourself for an idea that doesn’t work out.

• Let your mind wander often and set your brain free

Your day to day environment and routine can affect how you think and feel. The more stress-free and calm you are, the more receptive you will be to tap into your creative sphere. Find a relacing and inspiring spots that will help to trigger your creativity.

• Scribble things down often

Keep a journal and always scribble down your ideas and thoughts. Practice writing every though, idea, tip and inspiration down. Practice, lone brainstorming and think on paper.

• Be curious, have the “need to know” attitude and challenge accordingly

You cannot innovate and impress at work if you are not curious. All great innovators are curious and they like to solve problems. Try and go against the grains in how you see things.

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