Velocity Coaching

The secret to getting the most out of your top employees lies in drawing out their best talents, quickly discovering the unspoken rules of culture and teaching them the leadership techniques that they never learned in school or from their peers

Why Internal Mentors are Not Enough

Hiring an outside coach to mentor your managers and employees should be one of the most obvious investments a growth company would make. Yet few companies commit to such a program. A good coaching program will start to show return with as little as a two-percent increase in productivity of the team of the manager who is coached but often results in a 100% increase. Research indicates that it costs on average two years’ salary to recruit, train and replace a failed management hire. New hire velocity coaching is an insurance policy to make sure your investments in training and culture take hold and get your most talented players up to speed even faster than they ordinarily would.

Why should coaching come from outside your company instead of relying on seasoned employees to mentor your new hires and managers? Certainly, internal mentoring should be a key element to your success. Unfortunately, internal mentors also face many conflicts in their role. Some mentors do not want to be upstaged by new recruits or are so committed to the status quo that they cannot objectively coach the development of new ideas. Some mentors are so busy with their own duties that both they and their trainees wait for each others’ cues and fail to get up to speed in time. New managers might bring in different playbooks, but unless your culture is unusually noncompetitive creativity may be stifled.

Your employees, especially new recruits, are willing to work hard, but they don’t know where to put their energies. No one teaches the secret handshakes, no one risks sponsoring new employees even when they’re willing to, no one analyzes what makes your winners successful in your organization, and no one teaches how to identify the home runs your new recruits could hit in the first 90 days. People cannot see their own blind spots – that’s why they’re called “blind spots.” Successful new hires succeed because they burn the candle at both ends, but often fail in finding a balance that will keep them successful over the long haul.

Managers do not share their communication styles and expectations with their direct reports. Many employees learn by trial and error and some failed employees who would have been successful employees just never learned to read the road maps.

An outside coach can afford to be objective because his or her only commitment is in making each new hire or manager as successful in your organization as possible. An outside coach also brings specialized experience that most managers lack. Your managers can teach the what and the how, but often have difficulty identifying the who and the why. An experienced coach can accelerate the success of your entire team.

Many Benefits of Coaching

In addition to coaching your new managers and recruits, there are many reasons for supplying coaching to your more seasoned employees or even hire your own coach. These include:

• Improving the existing culture of the company
• Increasing your managers’ ability to leverage their time and resources.
• Improving communication styles and techniques
• Exploring and fully developing new ideas
• Receiving an opinion from a coach who has no vested interest in the outcome of a situation
• Expanding, clarifying, and clearly communicating your company’s vision and Velocity Ideals
• Providing a secure, safe, and confidential outlet to vent, when necessary
• Pointing out what your executive team can’t, won’t, or doesn’t see
• Increasing a manager’s personal “bandwidth” in order to handle a faster flow of information

How Velocity Coaching Works

When you enroll an employee in our Velocity Coaching program, they will have an introductory training class to outline the program, perform an initial inventory of strengths and problem areas and establish expectations. Each week for thirteen weeks the employee will meet with their coach in a phone consultation supported by web collaboration tools. For every hour of coaching, our coaches typically spend an additional three hours preparing, researching solutions and communicating outside of the session.

Individual 1-to-1 programs allow the employee to schedule time when it is convenient for them. They also have unlimited access to their coach during the week through phone and email. Individual sessions can focus on specialty content such as marketing leadership or a “new manager’s toolbox.”

Group session employees will be assigned to an open group with scheduling preference given for corporate goals and synergies of group members. They do not have unlimited access to their coach during the week but are encouraged to network and share with each other.

Note: to maintain our ethical standards and protect the trust that is necessary to realize employee performance enhancement, our coaches will treat each session as completely confidential to each employee. Nothing will be shared without obtaining the employee’s permission. Coaching is not a substitute for standard supervision and performance management.

Proven Experience

Boston Turner’s experience spans over 15 years of hands-on experience in the industries and practices we serve. Our professionals have worked with executive leaders in technology, enterprise software, payments, e-commerce, distribution and education.

Our founder, Matthew Turner, made a career of managing hyper-growth companies before starting the BOSTON TURNER Group. As the Chief Marketing Officer of Mercury Payment Systems, Turner tripled both the reseller channel (to over 1,200 resellers) and revenue (from $17 to $54m) and in doing so increased the value of the company from $20m to $120m according to a valuation study by CitiGroup. Turner previously led marketing for the distribution unit of Infor Global Solutions, NxTrend Technology (as part of a team that grew company valuation from $15m to $83m in four years) and an educational subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (where he raised sales closing rates from 14% to 55%). Turner is sought as a speaker for his expertise in lead generation, channel sales, and direct response marketing. He holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, San Bernardino, and is a special interest group coordinator for American Mensa, Ltd.