Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Ed Gillcrist, CEO of Shackleton Group:
Q: Can you tell us something more about the company and what you do?
A: At Shackleton Group, we look to help organizations stay several steps ahead of the competition through a series of organizational development products that define what we call “Corporate Maneuver Warfare.” Very simply, we can show you how to leverage business opportunities and increase your bottom line by being as effective and efficient in business as the Marine Corps is on the battlefield. Rather than simply managing projects, our clients realize added value from our unique, deliberate leadership approach to cultivating relationships, tracking & reporting progress, planning resources, and driving participation that not only enables successful completion of contract requirements but exceeds client expectations. Shackleton Group’s U.S. Marine Corps background has helped it develop practices imbuing trust and purpose among team members in organizations faced with complexity and clashing perspectives. Rooted in its warrior ethos, the Marine Corps has been effective over the years due to its ability to develop a team of leaders whose greatest weapons are cohesion, trust, and a shared purpose. At Shackleton Group, using the same tenets and principles, we strive to help you achieve the same kind of culture and success.
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Q: What is your backstory? How did your company come into being?
A: Shackleton Group was founded in response to a need, in both the government and commercial market places, for individuals with experience and foresight navigating the challenging waters of developing and growing your organization while continuing to maintain the high ops tempo demanded by you customers. In determining how we could best support those needs, Shackleton Group has relied heavily on the background of its owners, all former Marine Officers, and Aviators. In defining the services that we could provide our clients, the consultants and owners of Shackleton Group reflected on those critical aspects of their careers and those of their colleagues that have made them, and the teams they were a part of, successful. Shackleton Group discovered early on that when helping our clients determine the most suitable and effective strategy and structure to be successful in their market place; it was critical to view the client’s entire organization and help define the strategies and structure necessary to support and sustain a high-performance environment. In the past eighteen years, Shackleton Group’s team members have established a reputation of integrity, reliability, hard work, in bringing rapid and durable solutions to the table in collaboration with our clients.
Q: Can you give us insights into your services?
A: Shackleton Group offers its clients a tailored approach to navigating all aspects of organizational change that can modify the very culture of their organization. We help them develop an environment where their organization will operate at peak performance and where their team members excel because they are the architects of their own solutions. We collaborate with client teams to provide the tools necessary to harness the single most competitive advantage in the marketplace today: the focused, collective power of their people. We offer a wide range of products, services, and tools to do so. Our Organizational Development capabilities encompass all that we do, highlighting the capability to change when required at every level of the organization. We have worked extremely hard to create simple tools, templates models, and approaches that allow our clients to rapidly assimilate our approach to developing the organization and continue to sustain that success long after we are gone. Tools, models, and approaches include but are in no way limited to Organizational Assessment & Development Plan, Organizational Surveys, Process Mapping, Roles, Responsibilities, and Relationships (R3) Mapping, and Rapid Response Planning, Professional Facilitation Services, including Issue Mitigation/Smoke Jumping, Conflict Resolution, Value Project Leadership (VPL), and more. We offer professional development courses such as Facilitation Skills for Leaders, Organizational Leadership and Development Program, Leadership Advocacy Workshop, and Decision Making Under Stress, all designed to build leaders’ individual capabilities to affect the overall success of their organization. In Short, we help customers do what they do…better!
Q: What does it take to lead an organization?
A: At Shackleton Group, we always say that organizations are made up of people; therefore, they will develop and change constantly, with or without the input and guidance from leadership. Continuous development occurs as a natural byproduct in the evolution of every organization. It will either be guided by a deliberate leadership strategy, or if ignored, will occur on its own, and likely not yield desired results. With that in mind, leading an organization takes a deliberate strategy, one that relies on the development and trust of every team member. Leading an organization is more about the people around you, and leveraging their potential, rather than relying on yourself as the only leader. A great example of this is captured in Exercising Your Authority. This article not only recounts a stressful helicopter mission where the successful culture imbued throughout the Marine Corps, and that unit allowed leadership to seamlessly transition to a novice leader because, at that moment in time, that individual was the most capable of leading the crew to success. Organizational success is dependent on the ability to create a culture of leadership where leaders learn to make tough calls and focus their people on the needs of the organization.
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Q: What are the company’s plans and goals for the future?
A: As we move forward, we’re looking to expand into the commercial market place, and continue to leverage our experiences and philosophies based on military practices in highly dynamic and varying environments. We are also looking to reach audiences across a variety of mediums. For instance, we recently launched our Organizational Development & Assessment App, purposed to help guide teams through change. In the hands of an experienced leader, this app will provide a focus on the organization’s strategy, structure, people, and leadership, and describe how to maintain organizational balance. It will reveal where you need to adjust and help you determine how to make those adjustments with the specific purpose of achieving your organization’s bottom line objectives. Additionally, we will be launching a weekly podcast, which will give listeners a brief introduction to Shackleton Group’s culture and philosophies surrounding organizational development and leadership.
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