The organization that was to become Griffiths Sheppard Consulting Group was formed in 2002 by Jeff Griffiths and Kevin Sheppard, two Alberta-based Certified Management Consultants with a vision to improve organizations by improving the way people worked together. They were deeply involved with a number of Canadian HR Sector Councils, developing occupational and training standards, competency-based certification programs, and other products and services to support workforce development in key Canadian industrial sectors. The focus on this mandate and in these sectors is not by accident – both founders have spent the majority of their working lives focused on improvement in a “blue collar” world. Kevin ran a successful construction company prior to his consulting career, providing training and career opportunities to numerous individuals with barriers to employment – lessons learned from that experience were the basis of his book Professional Attributes, and led to his consulting practice. Jeff is the son of a skilled tradesman who immigrated to Canada in the 1950’s from the UK to seek a better future. Jeff has often stated “I wasn’t good enough to be a craftsman, so I became an officer instead”; he served as an air defence operations officer in the Canadian air force, where he acquired a fervent belief in the importance of continuously developing individual and team competency as a precursor to high performance.
Since the discontinuation of the Sector Council program, Griffiths Sheppard has sought new ways of pursuing its vision of a better, higher performing workplace for the benefit of all through creating “learning organization” paradigms and competency-based organizations. They help leaders understand that credentials and competency are not the same thing, and to look at “latent skills” within their organization as an asset that can bring about a significant competitive advantage.
With the demise of the Sector Council program, Griffiths Sheppard has sought new ways of pursuing its vision of a better, higher performing workplace for the benefit of all. We continue to focus on the ‘backbone’ industries in Canada – energy, construction, manufacturing, natural resources, etc. Our recent work is tied to efforts to improve the performance of major capital projects in Alberta’s energy sector as part of GO Productivity’s “Project Alignment and Delivery” (PAAD) initiative – vital work at a time of incredible change and economic upheaval in the province.