Taking Initiative

What is taking initiative when it comes to work? By doing something that you are not explicitly asked to do, but something you are interested in or passionate about.

What I am talking about here are situations where you see something that can be fixed or improved and you start to formulate a plan in order to do that. I have done that a few times and it's really helped me develop not only my career but myself as an individual and a person on many fronts. It was a really important and powerful experience!

The two examples that really come forward for me when I am thinking of this concept are this: organizing things and collecting but not something I was explicitly responsible for.

Years ago, when I was working in one of my earlier jobs, two promotions away from what I am doing now, I was pretty passionate and interested in a specific section of where I was working. We had supplies organized in a cabinet and that cabinet was something that was used but it was not something used every single day, but when it was used, it was a really important thing to have clean and organized. There were some attempts to do it but they were disjointed and largely by random people, so it wasn't consistent.

I was working with that cabinet and decided that I would take it upon myself to fix it up and make sure things were improved. I emptied each section of the cabinet, threw away old things that were expired or were no longer needed or used, documented everything on a checklist and sent that checklist to my supervisor and started to organized the ordering process for the items. This was something that started in one of the lulls during a work day but it was an important event. This showed the people, and the management around me, that I was willing to take initiative and do something that was important for the team overall, but was not something that would be in my specific job description. The relatively small task of organizing it had big dividends, smoother turnaround for when something was needed out of it and improved savings - items were not expiring as often as they were before because we were keeping the old ones up front and using them first instead of getting lost in the back.

More recently, I decided that my teams documentation for our area was sorely lacking, and one of the other areas that I work with not as closely did have some good stuff in their tool belt. I copied what they did, modeled it up to the specifics of what we needed it to be and published it for the team. This was absolutely not something that I needed to do but it was something that I knew was important not only for myself, as a learning opportunity, but for the team to have far better documentation and knowing step by step what to do and when.

These things took a considerable amount of my time but it goes back to the original concept: if you are passionate about something and see a need, it is really good to show initiative and get things done in your normal working capacity to do these things when you may have a lull or a few extra minutes. It doesn't take a whole two or three weeks of full time dedication to get these things where they need to be but they can be improved incrementally and slowly over time, so that not only do we benefit but everyone around us benefits. This is definitely the power of a good team - when people pitch in to help out!

I am not discussing these things to blow smoke up my own ass but to reflect on past situations where I saw a need and aimed to fill it, helping myself grow in various different ways because I also learned a lot more about what I was doing in these moments, which helps overall job performance and satisfaction. I think having small things like this are good ways that we can take what may be a routine or mundane job and getting them up to where we feel good about what we are doing.

Have you stepped up at work and performed something that was not your job, but it was an important thing for the overall team? Let me know in the comments!