Doro Dorsch Coaching

A senior project manager walked into a meeting and dismantled months of careful planning. The marketing specialist on the other side of the table watched it happen in real time. What followed was not a productive exchange of professional perspectives. It was two grown adults arguing about "creative freedom" and "timeline discipline" while the rest of the team akwardly started staring at their phones.

Sounds familiar? Kerry Patterson's Crucial Conversations has been on boardroom bookshelves for over two decades for exactly this reason. Not because conflict is new, but because most leaders were never actually taught how to handle it. They were promoted for their expertise, handed a team, and left to figure out the rest.

Three things the book gets right, and that every senior leader in a tech or engineering company should probably tattoo somewhere visible:

The first: safety before substance. Nobody absorbs a message when they feel cornered. They regroup, they defend, and they wait for their turn to fire back. Establish that the conversation is not an ambush, and you are halfway there before you have even made your point.

The second: your internal narrative is not the truth. The running commentary in your head, the one labelling someone as difficult or disengaged, is a story you wrote. Swap that for a question, and the whole room changes temperature.

The third: you are not in court. The goal is not a verdict. It is a conversation that both people walk away from with something useful. That is a harder skill than winning, and a far more valuable one.

If the hairpulling moments in your team are burning more energy than the actual work, try this approach. And if you would like some support, let's talk. Just send me a DM and I will set up a casual conversation over a coffee.

*******************************
Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

There is a particular kind of professional who is very good at going undetected.
They run the agenda, hold the team together, and somehow always know which budget line is about to cause trouble before anyone else has opened the spreadsheet. They appear calm, deliver reliably and smile through the quarterly review.

And then they go home and eat an unreasonable amount of biscuits in silence.

It is a pattern that shows up with striking regularity among senior marketing leaders in tech and engineering companies. Sharp, experienced, with decades of commercial credibility behind them and a low-grade sense of unease that has been following them around for years like a slightly aggressive houseplant they forgot to throw out.

Operating undercover inside their own careers. Following a script they did not write. Saying yes on autopilot. Absorbing other people's chaos because it is quicker than the conversation required to stop it. Filling the gaps nobody else notices until the gaps have become the main feature of the working week.

The biscuit drawer situation is a symptom, not the diagnosis.

What actually changes things is not a productivity framework or a time management course. It is the moment someone stops trying to solve the wrong problem. The real question is rarely how do I get more done. It is far more often: who decided this was my job in the first place, and do I still agree?

That is the investigation worth running.

Once the right questions are on the table, the picture tends to come into focus quite quickly. Which boundaries have been quietly dissolving for years. Which meetings are theatre. Which version of you walked through the door fifteen years ago full of ideas and has since been gradually negotiated down to a very well-dressed to-do list.

You don't turn from a piece of furniture to the main attraction by doing this. And why would your manager promote a boring but comfortable chair?

If any of this sounds like your calendar, your inbox, or your biscuit situation, the free assessment link in my bio takes about five minutes and surfaces more than three months of polite performance reviews ever will.

*******
Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

She looked well from the outside. Senior leader, sharp as anything, absolutely done with the noise in her own head.

Seven months later she wrote me a recommendation that included the words "mental clarity, emotional stability, peace, and confidence." In that order. I thought that was quite telling actually: clarity before confidence, not the other way around. That's usually how it goes.

People assume coaching is about fixing something broken. It rarely is. More often it's about someone who has been performing at a very high level for a very long time, wondering when it gets to feel like enough.

She trusted the process even when the exercises felt odd and the conversations got uncomfortable. That's the bit nobody warns you about. The work isn't always tidy. But the results tend to be.

Seven months. That's all.

Are you recognizing yourself in the first lines of this post and want to move out of the fog in your head? Let's talk, just a free virtual coffee meeting, no preparation needed. Just come as you are. Link is in my bio.

Nobody told me that showing emotion at work would make me a better leader.

Everything I learned in my first ten years of corporate life told me the opposite. Stay composed. Don't let them see you sweat. Certainly don't cry in a meeting.

So I didn't. I performed calm. I performed certainty. I performed "I have my s**t together" even when I absolutely did not. People followed instructions. Deadlines got met. But nobody was truly with me.

The shift happened when I stopped performing and started being honest. I told my team when a decision was hard. I said out loud when I was uncertain. Once, after a brutal round of feedback from leadership, I said: "That landed badly and I'm still processing it."
The team went quiet. And then they started doing the same.

Yes, it takes courage to go first. But the real surprise is what it unlocks. When you stop pretending, they stop pretending. And when a team stops pretending, you get the actual truth, not the polished version people think you want to hear.

The downside is real. Emotional leadership is exhausting. Some conversations take longer. You will occasionally share more than the moment needed. And in cultures that equate composure with competence, which most engineering companies do, it will sometimes get used against you.

But the leaders who built something lasting were those who mastered honesty. People do not follow a performance. They follow a person.

I have lived it, fumbled it, overcorrected it, and found a version that is mine. Worth every uncomfortable moment for me as well as for my team (according to their - hopefully - honest feedback)

If you are curious whether your leadership style is working for you or against you, the scorecard linked in my bio takes about five minutes.

***************************************

Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

Recently I bought myself a new set of watercolours. Not because I needed them. I have already heavily invested in the local art shop. But the packaging was beautiful and I convinced myself that these ones would finally make me good at this.

Spoiler: They did not.

But hey, how do they say? Painting and buying supplies are actually two different hobbies. 😉

But what they did do was give me two hours where my brain completely stopped its usual background noise. Gone. Just gone. There is something about trying to get water and pigment to do what you want that takes absolutely everything you have. You cannot catastrophise about next week's board presentation while you are desperately trying to stop burnt sienna from bleeding into your Payne's grey background.

It saves me from myself, basically. My painting looks like it was done by someone who was told what a tree is but has never actually seen one. It now lives in my sketchbook and I refuse to apologise for it.

What's the thing that switches your brain off completely? I am genuinely curious.

Sam Altman says AI will replace 95% of what marketers do. He would know. He is selling it.

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. When he made that prediction, he was talking about agencies, strategists, creative professionals. People like you.

Here is what he did not say. AI will replace the person who knows why the campaign matters, who can read the politics before the brief is written, who has spent 15 years learning that in an engineering company, marketing is always the last thing funded and the first thing blamed. That person is not a prompt.

What AI will replace is the generic. The interchangeable. The "just send something out" version of marketing that your C-suite already suspected was not that hard. And here is the irony in all of this: the output of a basic AI prompt looks exactly like what engineering leadership always assumed marketing was. So in a way, Altman is not wrong. He is just describing the floor, not the ceiling. What he forgets is that we are marketing to humans - and humans will want to buy from humans.

Most people I talk to are not panicking loudly. They try to get ahead of a wave that keeps moving, while running a team, hitting targets, and pretending in every meeting that they have it handled. But it is not the technology they are struggling with, it is the clear message of their own worth. It is hard to find that message in all the noise that is going on at the moment.

The leaders who will own the next five years are not the ones who learned every AI tool. They are the ones who got clear on what they bring that no model can replicate.

Curious where you actually stand? Head over to the link in my bio to take my five minute assessment specifically made for senior marketing managers. You will get your results immediately.

***********************************

Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

76% of marketing leaders are doing the work of two people. And 91% say their organisation expects too much.

CMI's 2026 Career and Salary research makes it plain. The detail that stings most: AI efficiency gains are not relieving the pressure. They are raising the bar. Every time a tool makes something faster, someone notices the freed-up capacity and fills it.
And still the conversation in most leadership teams stays firmly on output. More campaigns. Faster turnaround. Broader scope. The quarterly budget defence where you explain, again, why a campaign can't be fully handled by AI. And suddenly the "I don't like it - change it" you heard for years gets replace by a sudden willingness to accomodate for mediocre AI BS. WHAT???

What the data cannot measure is the Sunday evenings. The dread of the workload of the week ahead. The thought that gets louder the longer it goes unanswered: is this actually what the next fifteen years look like? Have you ever actually listen to the message your mind is trying to send you? Most people spend years trying to mute it rather than answer it.

If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, I would love to have a conversation. Just send me a note via DM.

***************************

Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦: 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘐𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘵𝘦, 𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟨 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘖𝘶𝘵𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬: 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘴. https://www.rfr.bz/f4dd1bee1

"The team was brilliant."

You said it in the debrief, fully convinced. And it was also the most expensive sentence you've spoken this quarter. Because you led all of that: The stakeholder mapping, the budget argument, the three rounds of revision nobody saw, the decision to push back on the brief when everyone else had already nodded and moved on. That was yours.

And you decided to choose the humble road. Here's what that costs: the next conversation about who's ready for more responsibility happens without your name in it. It costs you credibilty points you lack when cash-in time comes around.

Strategic self-promotion is saying "I led that strategically, and here's what it delivered" with exactly the same confidence you'd bring to a quarterly review. Your manager can't advocate for what they can't see. Neither can their manager.
The promotion doesn't go to the best working ant in the room. It goes to the one who's visible.

What was your biggest win this quarter? Write it down. One sentence. No hedging, no "the team" just what you did and what it produced. That sentence gives your clarity on your achievements so you are able to communicate them.

Curious where your visibility actually stands right now? Take five minutes to assess your leadership. Immediate results. Link is my bio.

Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

And the Oscar for best performance in chronic exhaustion goes to... nobody. Because nobody ever says it out loud.

There is no award ceremony, no moment where someone taps you on the shoulder and says: well done, you ran on empty for three years and still delivered. The audience doesn't even know they're watching a performance.

But it is there: The inner circle competition about: Who is carrying the most? Who is sleeping the least? Who is still responding to emails at 11pm on a Sunday and somehow making it look like a choice? Who in the leadership team can drink till 2 in the morning and still turn up the next day on stage glowing and all fresh?

You are winning. Congratulations. The prize is a gall bladder problem and a family that greets you with "hello stranger". And on top of that you know exactly well that this is a weird challenge doesn't really make sense.

And at some point you catch yourself thinking: this is me. This is actually what my life looks like. And it cannot continue like this. And it is the most honest thing your brain has said in months. Listen to it.

Find out where you actually stand and take the assessment linked in the bio. You will get your customized result immediately.

*************
Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.

It is 3am and your brain is running the presentation for the 47th time.

You are not even sure why any more. It feels like your brain has gone on autocue. Your amygdala, the tiny prehistoric drama queen in your skull, has decided that standing in front of 800 people carries roughly the same risk as being chased by something with teeth. It has not read any memos since the dinosaurs went extinct. It is simply doing its job, at the worst possible time, with spectacular commitment.

Here is what actually works: say it out loud to yourself. "My brain thinks this is a threat. It is not a threat." Four seconds. That is all it takes to move from threat mode back to the part of your brain that actually knows what it is doing. And acknowledge that the nerves are there because this matters to you. Do not try to push the feeling down. That is like offering snacks to the anxious little flatmate.

You have done hard things before. This is just your biology being overzealous. Know someone doing the 3am presentation spiral right now? Tag them.

**********************

Hi, I am Doro Dorsch. I work with senior leaders in engineering and tech navigating transformation, so they can own board-level impact.