It should be a strategic priority. In this fast changing business world those who have done so achieve higher project return on investment, better productivity, less employee resistance, among other benefits.

My colleagues at Prosci worked with 10 industry innovators, from a mix of industries across the globe, to understand how they're prioritising organisational change competency as a strategic objective. There are six universal and effective tactics they are all using.

1. Align with your culture to improve alignment and acceptance. Organisations that are successful in change management focus on culture. Having a culture of taking care of people is crucial to getting buy in to change and embedding sustained change. But you also need a culture of discipline in projects and processes as well as making sure measurement is king.

2. Deploy on a key initiative to demonstrate the impact of change management. It is always best to start building change management competency by focusing on a project that reaches across an organisation and that has high impact. That way more staff will see the benefit of change management.

3. Build a change network to build support and momentum throughout your organisation. Some organisations call it a change pioneer network and others called it a change management community of practice. The common theme is including the heads of transformation projects and a range of business units to drive change consensus and localise change management.

4. Go where the energy is to create collaborative partnerships to pull change management forward. The mistake organisations often make is to market and view change management as a HR process instead of as a business process. Smart organisations use their communities of practice to support business units implementing change.

5. Integrate with existing competencies to embed change management skills in professional development paths. Smart organisations also make leading change a key competency for their leaders and provide training and mentoring to embed that competency. One organisation integrated change management skills into its project management boot camp and workbook rather than keeping change management and project management separate which, sadly and mistakenly, many organisations do.

6. Treat growing your capability like a change to improve outcomes with structure and intent.

I have written in previous columns about the effectiveness of making the establishment of change management a change management project. It is a good way to establish and test change management processes and capabilities. Growing your change management capability is critical to ongoing and wider success. Make that process subject to the same rigour and give it the same status and attention as other projects such as establishing new systems or technologies.

The good news is you may download Prosci's free e book to learn more about this change management research and the detail of the best practice case studies from leading organisations. Visit prosci.com