# Took the Initiative: What It Means and How to Do It at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/took-the-initiative/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/took-the-initiative.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving influence at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer "Took the initiative" means acting before you were asked. What actually counts at work, a 7-step way to do it, and how to describe it afterward. ## Key facts - Title: Took the Initiative: What It Means and How to Do It at Work - Category: Influence - Primary skill: Influence - Related skills: Working with Your Manager, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: took the initiative - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/took-the-initiative/ ## What this page covers - "Took the initiative" means acting before you were asked. What actually counts at work, a 7-step way to do it, and how to describe it afterward. - Practical guidance for took the initiative - How this topic connects to Influence ## Detailed explanation "Took the initiative" means you started something before anyone assigned it to you. At work it describes noticing a problem, a gap, or a task nobody owns, judging that it is worth acting on, and acting on it — rather than waiting for the instruction to arrive. You may be about to write the phrase about yourself, on a résumé or [in a self-assessment](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-performance-review/), or you may have just heard it in a review. Either way, the phrase is the easy part. The judgment behind it is what people are actually assessing, which is why a claim that sounds fine in your head can wobble the moment someone asks what you actually did. That part almost nobody spells out, so here it is, in the order it usually happens. ## What "took the initiative" actually means Dictionaries keep it simple. Cambridge defines taking the initiative as being the first to act, and therefore being in a position to control what happens next; Dictionary.com dates the phrase to the late 1700s and glosses it as beginning a task or a plan of action. Both point at the same thing: whoever moves first sets the terms. At work the phrase narrows. Career guides such as Indeed describe initiative as assessing a situation and acting on it independently — contributing beyond your core responsibilities rather than waiting to be asked. That last part is the whole test. Doing your assigned work well is competence. Initiative starts where the assignment stops. Which is why "I took the initiative" is a claim rather than a description. It says you saw something, decided it mattered, and carried it far enough to make a difference. ## How to take the initiative at work, step by step ### 1. Notice what nobody has picked up Initiative starts with noticing, and noticing is the part that cannot be faked. Mind Tools describes people who show initiative as spotting opportunities their colleagues and managers have not seen, usually because they are curious about how the organization works rather than only about their own tasks. Two places are reliably productive. The first is the pile of jobs everyone avoids because they are tedious or slow; Indeed suggests asking your manager to hand you one of those on purpose. The second is repetition — if the same client question, the same handover mistake, or the same missing file keeps coming back, that pattern is the opportunity. New starters have an advantage here, because the friction is still visible to them. ### 2. Check whether it is yours to start This is where initiative goes wrong, and it goes wrong in one direction: acting on something that was not yours to act on. Indeed's guidance is to use what you know about your own role to judge whether you have the competence and the [authority to decide alone](/knowledge/decision-making/decision-making-authority/), or whether the idea should be put to someone first. That is a real judgment call, not a formality. The useful thing to know is that asking does not cancel the initiative — Reed makes the point that going to your manager when you are unsure how to approach something still reads as initiative, because you brought both the problem and the intent to fix it. What reads badly is not asking and then getting it wrong. ### 3. Bring a fix, not just the flag Reed puts this near the top of its advice: solve problems, do not only report them. Before you raise an issue, work out one or two possible ways of dealing with it. The reason this lands so hard is mechanical. A flag hands work to somebody else — now they have to think about it. A flag with two options hands them a decision instead, which takes a minute rather than an afternoon. Same information, completely different experience on the receiving end. If you change one thing about how you already work, change this one: it moves you from someone who spots problems to someone who shifts them. ### 4. Say what you plan to do before you do it A short heads-up costs almost nothing and removes most of the risk. Tell the relevant person what you noticed, what you intend to do about it, and roughly how much time it will take. You are not asking permission for every step — you are agreeing a boundary once, so the next four things you start do not need a conversation at all. This is also when you find out whether someone is already on it, which saves you from the most deflating version of initiative: finishing something that was half-built somewhere else. ### 5. Scope it so it does not eat your actual job BetterUp's guide is blunt about the trap: check your capacity before taking something on, because [saying no](/knowledge/time-management/how-to-say-no-at-work-without-feeling-guilty/), or moving it to next week, beats overworking and under-delivering. Initiative that makes you miss your ordinary commitments does not read as ambition. It reads as poor judgment about priorities. Cut the idea down to the version you can genuinely finish alongside the work you already owe people. A small completed improvement is worth more than an ambitious one that stalls in week three — and it buys you the room to try a bigger one next time. ### 6. Follow it through to the finish BetterUp also notes that taking initiative rarely looks like a snap decision; far more often it is consistent effort, preparation, and thoughtful action stretched over time. The offer is the easy part. Credit attaches to completion — to the thing being in place and working, not to the moment you volunteered. Expect the middle to be dull and slightly awkward: chasing the person who has to approve it, redoing the part that did not work, [reminding people it exists](/knowledge/influence/stakeholder-buy-in/). Seeing it through is also what makes your next offer easy for people to say yes to. ### 7. Put it on the record while the details are fresh Within a few days, write down four things: what you noticed, what you did, who it helped, and what changed. Do it while you can still remember specifics, because specifics are exactly what evaporate — and they are the only part anyone finds persuasive six months later. Résumé guides such as VisualCV and Resume Worded build their initiative examples on that pattern, pairing an unprompted action with a measurable outcome: introducing a new project management system and cutting task completion time, spotting an inefficiency in a process and reducing waste, moving a team to a new CMS and shortening publication time. You need the number at the moment you have it, not at review season. ## When "I took the initiative" is worth saying out loud The phrase carries no weight on its own. Performance-review guidance treats initiative as a bundle — being proactive, taking charge of a situation, finding solutions without being told — so a bare claim invites the obvious follow-up question, and you want the answer ready before it arrives. The strongest version follows the shape of step 7. One self-assessment example collected by the careers site examples-of.com runs like this: noticing the team's growing use of AI tools and data dashboards, completing two online courses outside work hours, then writing short how-to guides for the team's specific workflows and running two optional lunch-and-learn sessions. Noticed, acted unprompted, other people got something out of it. No adjectives required. One caution. Do not claim initiative for work that was assigned to you, however well you did it. That is the version managers and interviewers catch, and it costs more credibility than saying nothing would have. If the hard part is judging which of your own working habits are strong enough to put in writing, that is an ordinary blind spot rather than a character flaw — and a straight read on [where your strengths actually sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) settles it faster than staring at a blank document. ## Why initiative lands for some people and not for others Read back over those seven steps and notice how little of it is about the idea itself. Almost every step is about judgment, timing, and how you handle the people around the idea — and those are habits rather than talents. **Influence** is the closest fit, because taking the initiative is one of the ways influence gets built rather than something separate from it. In practice it comes down to being willing to ask, on the grounds that the worst available answer is no; to setting the agenda by volunteering to prepare, write, or organize something before anyone hands it out; and to moving on openings while they are still open. Do that a few times and it stops being an event — you start getting asked, which is a much easier position to work from. **Working with Your Manager** decides whether steps 2 and 4 feel stressful or routine. The specific thing worth agreeing, once, is how much decision-making authority you actually have, after which you know what you can start without checking. The other half is visibility: results do not announce themselves, so making your work legible to your manager, and walking into a review with the record from step 7, is what turns a year of small initiatives into something that counts. **Building Confidence** is often the real bottleneck, because most people know what needs doing long before they offer to do it. The way through is not feeling braver first. It is deciding in advance exactly when and how you will make the offer — which meeting, which sentence — and accepting that it will be uncomfortable while you do it. The confidence follows the action rather than arriving ahead of it. Any of the three can be your weak link, and it is rarely obvious from the inside which one it is. The **free Job Skills Test** covers these alongside the rest of the **twelve work skills** it measures, so [finding your lowest-scoring ones](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) tells you where the effort belongs before you spend it in the wrong place. If you have ever done something because it plainly needed doing and then never mentioned it again, part of this is already in how you work — the noticing is there, and that is the half that is hardest to install from scratch. What the seven steps add is everything that happens after the noticing, and all of it is practice rather than personality. None of it requires becoming a louder or pushier version of yourself: step 4 is one sentence, and step 7 is four lines in a notes app. It is worth building sooner rather than later, because the share of your work that nobody thinks to assign you only grows as you take on more — and these are the habits that make that feel manageable instead of daunting. You have just read a seven-step breakdown of something most people file under personality and leave there, which is the part most people skip. ## See where your work skills stand So the only thing left is to find out which of these you already do well and which are worth your attention. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment that scores you across all twelve work skills — including the influence habits, the manager alignment, and the confidence to make the first offer that this article has been circling. It takes 7 minutes, there is nothing to prepare, and your results appear the moment you finish: which skills are already working for you, and which one or two would change the most if you put time into them. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, 7 minutes, and your results are on screen as soon as you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? "Took the initiative" means acting before you were asked. What actually counts at work, a 7-step way to do it, and how to describe it afterward. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Influence. It also relates to Working with Your Manager, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence/took-the-initiative/ Preferred summary: ""Took the initiative" means acting before you were asked. What actually counts at work, a 7-step way to do it, and how to describe it afterward." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.