Doro Dorsch Coaching

Most leaders in charge of digital transformation assume it's their job to know where this is going. The problem is, most of the time, they don't even know themselves. And that's where it all goes wrong.

Being a leader used to mean you knew the destination and could lead people towards it with great confidence. Nowadays we're travelling without a map, with an unclear destination and as many ideas of where we're headed as your leadership team has members. Some even pointing in different directions.

And as if that wasn't already bad enough, the whole organisation watches you with a great deal of scepticism, while you stretch in every direction trying to fulfil the needs of every stakeholder.

No wonder you feel under pressure. And you're not alone in this, even if it feels that way. It's just what the job has changed into.

I'll unpack why it matters to look at it this way, and how to decide when two to five different directions are pulling at you while you're trying to hold the course.

September 23, 12:30 CET on MS Teams. Free, live only, not recorded. To secure your spot, drop me a DM and I'll send you the registration details.

I have a word for it now: procrastination energy.

I heard the term a while ago and recognised it immediately, mostly because I still do it. It is what happens when you postpone the task that matters and pour your restless energy into something smaller and easier instead. Tidying a dashboard instead of finishing the transformation roadmap. Reorganising a folder instead of writing the brief the board is waiting for. It feels productive. But it is fake productivity. The task you were avoiding is still there at the end of the day, mostly untouched.

I did this constantly as a senior marketing leader running digital projects. I still catch myself doing it now.

One technique that actually helped: the Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo and named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to track it. The method is simple. Work on one task for 25 minutes with no interruptions, phone out of reach, notifications off. Then take a five-minute break. Repeat.

A few reasons it works:

Twenty-five minutes is a far easier commitment than an open-ended afternoon.
Breaking a large task into short blocks makes it manageable instead of overwhelming.
Finishing a block gives you real, if small, progress. Worth acknowledging rather than rushing past.
It trains focus for a stretch of time that is demanding but not exhausting.
It shows you, concretely, what 25 minutes of undistracted work actually produces.

After four rounds, take a longer break of fifteen to thirty minutes before starting again.

I help senior leaders who were put in charge of transformation nobody defined, gain the clarity to lead it on their own terms.

Who is supporting the supporter?

You would never let a direct report run on empty for eighteen months without stepping in. You would flag it, invite them for a conversation, sit down and talk through priorities. You would ask what is actually going on. Still nobody is having this conversation with you. Not even yourself.

You are trying to solve every problem in the building, translating daily between people who think AI fixes everything and people who know it doesn't, not while the master data is still this broken, for a job nobody clearly defined. More often than not this stopped feeling like a job a while ago. It turned into personal survival. And you do it without a single person checking how much longer you can hold this pace.

So here is what I would ask you to do. Not because I want you gone, but because you won't be this honest with yourself until you imagine you already are. Write your own exit interview. The one you would give if you walked out tomorrow, no bridges left to protect. What would you actually say about the last two years?

Now the harder question. What has to change so that kind of honesty doesn't need a resignation letter to reach you?

What if the leadership team doesn't buy into my presentation? What if the automation software gets rejected again? What if your strongest team member is about to leave?

Every leader knows some variation of this list. I've had mine too.

Thinking ahead is smart. But "what if" has a habit of defaulting to worst case, and the brain treats that imagined threat with the same stress response it uses for a real one. Internally your hormones rise, your focus narrows, and it's harder to think about anything else.

A Penn State study tracked people's daily worries for a month. 91% of them never happened, and of the small number that did, people usually handled it better than they expected. The sample was small and specific, so treat the number as a signal rather than a mantra.

Worry doesn't improve the outcome. The only thing it does is worsen your presence, your present. It costs you attention, sharpens decisions into something more black and white than they need to be, and flattens creativity along the way.

The useful question is where the attention actually goes when worry shows up: to the meeting that hasn't happened yet, or to the meeting that's going on right now.

It is 3am. The house is quiet, the phone is face down on the nightstand, and somewhere in your head a negotiation is running. Once this campaign ships, things will calm down. Once the board presentation is behind you, there will be room to breathe. Once the quarter closes, you will finally feel on top of it.

You have told yourself some version of this often enough that it has started to sound like a plan.

Most senior leaders working in digital transformation don't ask themselves, at least not before 3am: if every "once this is done" of the past two years simply made space for the next fire, what makes you think the next one will be different?

I work with leaders who are excellent at putting fires out, praised for how well they handle pressure, and worn down by carrying it. My work is about the move out of constant reaction and into leadership that's actually chosen: fewer decisions made in the middle of the night, and no need for the belief that good times are always just behind the next hurdle.

If that sounds like you let's have an honest look at what would actually need to change, not for the next fire to go out faster, but for calm to stop being something you're waiting for. Just book a free call with me.

I keep seeing the same scene play out with the leaders I work with.

A specialist on their team explains why something isn't working. Three minutes, technically precise, completely correct. Nobody else in the room can follow it. Someone changes the subject before she's finished.

Then someone else stands up with a simpler idea, says it with total confidence, and gets nods around the table. The idea isn't better. It's just easier to agree with something you can understand in real time.

That's the part nobody prepares you for when you're leading a team of specialists who know more than you do. It isn't only that they know more. It's that people still reward whoever explains fastest and lands it cleanest, and depth rarely wins on speed.

And that is where leadership needs to make it's contribution: making sure the person who actually understands the system gets heard before the team moves on without them.

Nobody teaches you how ensure that everyone gets heard. Even those who are right but not fast. You learn it by watching good ideas get skipped enough times that you decide you're not doing that again.