Handle small failures with honesty.

Innovation rarely happens when you're afraid of making mistakes.

A “test and learn” approach builds your creative problem-solving skills. As you move up, you’ll be expected to find new ways to save the company time and money.

Look for low-stakes opportunities to try a new approach or a different tool. If you have a repetitive task, spend thirty minutes trying to find a more efficient way to automate it or a new way to show the results. Even if your experiment doesn’t work perfectly, the act of trying to improve a process prevents you from going through the motions. It shows your manager that you have a mindset focused on continuous improvement rather than doing the bare minimum.

An experiment will go sideways. Use it as an honest learning moment instead of trying to hide the error. Share it with your team by saying, “I tried to streamline this task using a new method, but I found that it created this specific issue instead.” This level of transparency is refreshing and encourages a team culture where others feel safe to innovate too. The goal is to be a fast learner who’s not afraid to test the boundaries of how things are currently done to find a better way forward.

Put these approaches into practice.

Let’s look at practical ways to treat repetitive tasks as low-stakes opportunities for experimentation.