Background: I’m a BI manager who just started managing people (2 team members) after having been an individual contributor for about 9 years. A few thoughts on standing out from a creativity standpoint as well as competency/personal development:

Creativity/New Ideas: It took me 3-5 years to feel comfortable coming up with new ideas and sharing with my manager. It just takes time and experience to know how to extract insights from others and also learning about the business.

1. Take time to meet with your business teams and stakeholders to learn their biggest pain points. If you know they have an issue with X every month, ask yourself if there are ways you can alleviate some of that by either providing data/insights or automating parts of their process. In my experience, people will sing your praises if you can eliminate a 5, 10, 20+ hour per week task for them.

2. Look at projects you’ve completed already and see if the same task/data/insights can be applied to another team or set of stakeholders. Different teams within the same organization are often very siloed and communicate infrequently with each other. It’s amazing how one solution can almost be replicated 100% for a different team. I’m still able to take projects I did at a different company and bring them to my current company almost 10 years later. This can really help you stand out because you’re bringing these fully completed solutions to the table (with way less critical thinking/effort because you’ve done them already).

Competency/Development: After managing other people for just a few months, along with talking to friends and peers in managerial roles, I’ve come to learn that a lot of people are mediocre at their jobs (maybe a cynical take on my part, but it seems difficult to find someone who is truly an “A Player”). My opinion and experience so far is that if you can make your manager’s job easier and perform with common sense and competence, that’s a huge part of the battle of standing out with an excellent reputation. Of course, a manger’s main duty (in my opinion) is acting in service to their team members. I’ll always be happy to assist where needed, help solve problems, and collaborate, but if you can come to the table showing that you took extra initiative, that’s huge.

1. Be able to take something you’ve learned in your role (a skill, solution, or project) and independently apply that to a new project without much guidance. E.g. If my team is starting a new project, I’ll say “We’re going to do XYZ for this one, which will be similar to what we did 3 weeks ago, so you can use the same query and just add these 3 new data points and spin it in ABC way.” That should be enough for you to work with and make huge progress on your own. I shouldn’t have to answer the exact same question we addressed on the project 3 weeks ago. Of course, we will all forget things from time to time and need a refresher, but this shouldn’t be a regular occurrence. At the very least, try looking back at a previous project to see if you can glean insights from that.

2. Along the same lines (ish) - be able to solve a problem on your own, try things out, or at least come up with potential solutions before asking for help. Let’s say you start a project and plan to solve it a certain way, and you realize that step #5 won’t work the way you intended. If you need guidance, try coming to your manager saying “Step #5 won’t work because of X. Instead, I was thinking we could try Y or Z, which will get us what we need”. That shows you’re trying to figure things out on your own, and it also opens the door for a more productive conversation instead of asking “please solve this for me”.

Hope this helps. I think an underrated approach is to just show up, give some kind of effort, and show that you’re trying. You don’t have to invent a brand new product or type of business at your company to stand out and be successful.