Ann Depta founded Meridian Consulting Group, an executive coaching business, two decades ago. She’s an amazing, energetic woman and a good friend. We have worked together frequently, primarily through her business.
Between the two of us, we’ve been coaching for 45 years in a variety of settings: private, corporate, not for profit, large and small. Along the way we have coached the most seasoned managers to the ones who have just been promoted into management positions. These managers express frustration with the same issues: “what do you say and how do you say it when you’re trying to get the best out of people and you don’t know how to get them there?”
Increasingly in today’s workforce, people who are coaching are working managers and doing their best to attain their own aggressive goals while managing the work of others. There are fewer resources and more to get done in any given day. Additionally, managers are working across geographical distances, across generational boundaries and in organizations that are changing at the speed of light. What generally gets sacrificed is coaching time. Most managers we’ve coached have the best of intentions – to be that coach that they’ve appreciated along the way, but how do you find coaching time and how do you use it?
We set out to provide a “quick reference guide” to the 26 principles we found the most thematic in our work. To this end, we wrote “A Coaching Alphabet.”

Coaching is paradoxically as easy as it sounds and as hard as it sounds: easy in that the principles contained in this book are simple and straightforward; and hard in that it takes time to connect with people, perhaps even more when the stakes are so high.
Our goal is to make the lives of managers easier and to give them a tool that is useful, relevant, applicable, and “real time”. Studies continue to support the fact that happy and productive employees have one thing in common, regardless of the organizational setting: they report having managers who spend time with them and communicate clearly what needs to be done and that it matters.
Good coaching is at the heart of what helps organizations run effectively and providing a satisfied and engaged workforce.
A Coaching Alphabet by Ann Depta and Susan Hewitt is now available at Amazon.com