If you work in a Corporate services area, whether that be in People and Culture, a Program Management Office or Risk and Compliance and you want to shift the mindset and ways of working across the organisation, then the easily 'card' to play is that it is impossible because you have no authority in that area and nothing could be further from the truth.

You can indeed influence behaviours and even change behaviours of those you work with or support using these five strategies:

1) Create a win/win situation with your key stakeholders. Understanding how to solve your stakeholders issues with your change, and creating a sense of togetherness will also create a sense of shared ownership of the change. Sometimes explicitly linking or highlighting the connection between your change and how it may help them is a way in which your change will generate support.  How is your success linked to their success? 

2) Understand and leverage both the formal and informal networks. If the grapevine is ...

I am a big fan of continuous improvement, and when you aren't interested in making the same mistakes twice you can become quite frustrated when people are decide to do what's crazy. That's right, they keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. The definition of insanity according to Einstein - and trust me there are a lot of insane people out there!

Through all of the different change I have managed early in my career, you get to know the traps for new players. Those 'gotcha's' that you don't need to learn more than once. No matter how experienced you are every time you introduce change into an organisation, you learn lessons. If you aren't capturing them then you are missing out on a great opportunity to support your organisation to change and adapt faster.

Here are my top 5 lessons (although this may change again) on what NOT to do when managing change:

1) Thinking you should be the voice of the change - not the leaders. Leaders owning and speaking to the change is o...