The Talent Forge: Shaping Workforce Behaviors with Jay Johnson

Practical Leadership For First-Time Managers with Dalmo Cirne

• Jay Johnson • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Promotions are exciting until the work changes under your feet. We sat down with leadership expert Dalmo Cirne to unpack why great individual contributors can stumble as new managers—and how to replace uncertainty with clarity, systems, and steady wins. Dalmo makes a bold claim that resonates: leaders don’t suddenly become incompetent, they arrive unprepared. From there, we dig into how to prepare on purpose.

We break down the four streams of leadership—manage self, downstream, upstream, and sidestream—and show why most headaches come from over-focusing on the team and ignoring the other three. Dalmo explains how strong explanations beat raw facts for real decision-making, helping you avoid snap judgments about people and communicate trade-offs with sponsors. You’ll hear pragmatic ways to document processes before you teach them, so training matches the learner’s level and reduces friction during execution.

If this conversation helps you think differently about leadership, share it with a manager who just got promoted, subscribe for more practical playbooks, and leave a quick review telling us which stream you’ll improve first.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
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Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we're shaping workforce behaviors. I'm really excited about today's episode. We are going to feature our special guest, Dalmo Cernay. And Dalmo is an expert in leadership management with a 30-year career spanning a number of different corporations. So welcome to the show, Dalmo.

Dalmo Cirne:

It's great to be here, Jay. Thank you for uh the invitation. I'm super excited for this conversation.

Jay Johnson:

It's my pleasure. I would love to understand what was it that inspired you to get into those space of leadership development, talent development, and all of the amazing things that you're doing. I mean, you're an author, you're a coach, it seems like, a consultant, a trainer, and I know that you've spent some time at work day too. So I'd love to tell us a little bit about your story.

Dalmo Cirne:

Absolutely. Every person, they have their reason why they make changes in their careers, what triggered specific move. In my case, it was I wanted to build something that was more than I could do it myself. And I realized I need help to do this. And inevitably, it leads to okay, you need to be in a position of leadership, you need to assemble a team if you are to build this project, right? And that's what triggered that movement for me. Other people they have different motivations. Some people are naturally born to be in that position of leadership, others they have different incentives. Um, but yeah, that one was what triggered it for me.

Jay Johnson:

That's incredible. So as you were navigating that space, what was going through your mind? Because I I love that you said that you're looking that you were looking for you know support or help or some kind of guidance. Because I think a lot of times when we step into a leadership position, it feels lonely. It feels like, oh my gosh, I've got to figure this all out on my own. And it sounds to me like that wasn't necessarily the case for you. So, what inspired you to think? Like, hey, let's reach outside of the circle.

Dalmo Cirne:

Actually, it was the case for me. I struggled completely. I was struggling, I was struggling on a daily basis to be in that position of leadership. You you lose all familiarity, right? You you're no longer making direct contributions, you have to develop a different set of skills. And that was one of the things that eventually motivated me to start writing about leadership, eventually led to a book. But that struggle is where perhaps where the Peter Principle comes uh from, right? I don't know if you're familiar with uh the book from 1969 from Lawrence Peter, and he called the Peter Principle saying that you get promoted to your level of being incompetent. I'm oversimplifying, I'm not doing justice to the book, it's actually a great book. But basically, uh it's saying that at some point you get become incompetent at your job, but I think that is incomplete. It's not that you are competent your whole life, one fine day you land in a position you decided to become incompetent. I like to think that you are unprepared to that position, right? Because you are using a different set of skills, you lost familiarity with your job that you were doing before. You're basically in uncharted territories. Can we get you prepared to land into that position? That would kind of put you in a much better position to be, I know what I'm doing, I know what is expected, therefore I can be successful in doing this job.

Jay Johnson:

It's so smart. And it's one of the things that I see pretty frequently in organizations is somebody is really, really good at their job. And sales is always one of the easy ones to pick on. They're top salesperson year after year after year, and finally they get promoted to sales leader or sales manager, and all of a sudden they start to struggle. And part of that is well, they were really good at the tactical, technical aspects of sales. But when you put somebody into a leadership position, it's it's a very different game. You have to, you have to think about doing work through other people rather than just resolving it all yourself. So to hear you say that and to hear that you lived that, I think is really powerful because I think as leaders or as organizations, we often forget when somebody's moving into a position that they need to be onboarded to that position. They need time to develop the skill sets there. So, what did that process look like for you when you kind of found yourself going, all right, maybe I'm out of my depth here? What was that experience like?

Dalmo Cirne:

Yeah, there are two scenarios to come to consider over there. The first one, you have startup companies, they're smaller in size, they don't have that many resources nor processes. So basically, you are on your own. You're pretty much trying to learn as you go. Um, on larger companies, they have some training, but the training tends to be very overfit for the policies of the company. It doesn't really prepare you to be a great leader, but is more like okay, you are cog in the machine of this corporation. If you do this, you'll be able to keep just like churning and and uh chugging along and going forward. But there's an there are other options uh for us to consider. One, you can uh as in a startup, you can start learning on your own. There are going to be many books out there. One of the problems I have with those books is most of them are written to the C-suite level. It's like here's what you do as a CEO or as a CFO or a COO. Um, not many are talking to the lower levels. Here's how we learn how to do it. Here are the ropes that you learn from and uh develop those those skills, right? That's one audience I'm I'm speaking to in a book is the level of middle management. Um the other thing is many of those books they have lots and lots and lots of filler stories. You start reading the book, it starts telling your masters, and then they make a pause and they tell a story. It is a wonderful story, it's very captivating. You get engaged with the story, and you finish that, and you're left with a question mark how the heck am I going to connect that story to my case, to my situation? And unless you have the same life experiences as the author, you're not going to be able to connect the dots, you're not going to be able to bring that story to your own life. And so you end up not learning anything from this story, not be able to connect the dots. You were never going to read that story again. Basically, it was entertainment. It made you feel good, but it amounted to nothing. Right? Um, so those are things that uh we all have read those books, right? We we know what those books are. Um how about if you have a book that not only gives you the framework, but also practical exercises. What if a book is to be kept on your desk instead of on your shelf? Because it's reference material, you go back, say, Oh, yeah, that's how you do it. Here's a sample, here's an example, here's how you execute things. That would be a much better tool for you to have accessible.

Jay Johnson:

I really love what you said there. And and and I want to I want to dig in on this because I think it's so important when we think about behavior change, and we think about you know modern efforts to change behavior, you know, whether that's training, whether that's in-classroom virtual, whether that's even, you know, LMS type training, where we send somebody off to the ether and and get something. I think you said something that is just so aligned with how I've experienced uh behavior change. I I really want to dig in on this. And what it was was that your personal experiences influence how not only you're reading a scenario, a situation, a story, but how you're going to be able to get from point A to point D. And I think that's missed a lot. I think I see a ton of organizations that'll put out a manual, a policy, or whatever else. And they fail to actually take into account, okay, if this is written from a master level, I think about it. I'll use an analogy to make this really clear. If Michael Jordan were to teach me how to play basketball and said, do it like this, Jay, I'm never going to be able to do it like he is. Because there's there's steps that I'd be missing, there's practice that I would be missing, there's different milestones. Okay, I need to move my knees like this, I need to move my elbows like this, I need to keep my hands in this position. And I see so much effort going towards behavior change that is very um, I'm gonna call it uh experienced biased. They're experienced bias. If you have the experience, if you have the knowledge, if your situation aligns perfectly to what mine is, I'm gonna get through. But if it doesn't, there's gonna be probably gaps. There's gonna be some misses. So let me ask this, Dalmo, in relation to that, because I think this is so important for every everybody out there that's trying to shift behaviors. How have you maybe shifted that thinking? What are you doing differently that creates the condition that wherever somebody's at, they can maybe take that first step, or maybe they can get the experience or find how those gaps may exist in themselves or even in the tools. What does that look like for you? Because I think this is so important.

Dalmo Cirne:

You mentioned uh Michael Jordan. Dunking a ball is so easy, right? You you get a basketball, you'll dribble a few times, jump, and put in a basket.

Jay Johnson:

How hard can it be? Right? I've never done it, but simple, right?

Dalmo Cirne:

Right to do it yourself, right? It's saying something as you described, saying something or putting on a manual is is incomplete information. It may make sense to the person describing it, but to the person reading it, they say, okay, what do I do now? To be the example of dribbling the ball, putting a basket, boom, you're done. Perfect. It is far more complicated. When I started my journey and uh decided eventually to write a book, that is a decade in the making. I had that uh philosophy of okay, uh, if I am learning and if I want someone to ever pay attention to whatever I have to say, I need to describe the steps. It's not only the why, but what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and even when to do it. You do too soon, it may be damaging doing too late, you may miss the boat, right? So taking notes and going through the struggles, uh describing taking notes of the steps that I was going through, then you can replicate, you can reproduce that in a way that, oh, now I can explain in a way where people can follow those steps and get the same results, can get reproducible results. There's one controversial thing uh I mentioned in the book, and I'm pretty sure it's gonna get some people rubbed the wrong way, but I say that facts don't matter. They do, right? Of course they do, but I say facts don't matter because there's a layer beneath facts which is explanatory knowledge. It's an area in epistemology where you say, if you can explain something, you can describe the facts, you can explain. But if you start from the facts and not knowing why they are the facts as they are without the explanation, you can take in different directions. You can use inductions like uh one plus one equals two, therefore the sky is purple, right? Uh I I give an absurd uh example over here, but it's just to show that with induction, you can start from a fact without knowing explanation, then you take the story in a completely different direction, and people will be carried along because they build that trust with your initial facts. But if you begin with the explanation of why, if you come up with a BS explanation, it will become immediately obvious. So that's why I'm saying that the facts don't matter. It's like, well, they do if you know the explanation. If they don't know the explanation, press pause, understand why, then you are good to go. So being able to organize knowledge in a way that I can tell a story explaining why the process is organized that way, it allows a reader on the other side to understand the foundation to say yes, it makes sense, and could not be any other way. By uh reading like this, it becomes that reference material that later you can go back and say, How do you do that again? And you get the material, you reread, oh yeah, that's it, and move forward. So that was not just triple the ball and and dunk it, it was hey, here are the exercises you have to do, here's how you jump, and and so on. But that applied to leadership and management.

Jay Johnson:

I okay, so there's so much to unpack there, Delmo, and I love it. Um, I could hear your engineering background kind of come through a little bit in some of those things. And I know you've worked at some incredible companies, Disney is one of them, and and a number of others. But one of the things that I heard you say that I think is immediately applicable and something that somebody could take away from this is documenting the process before you start delivering the information. And it's so funny to me how often I I've done an exercise in the past, and I'm gonna comment on the facts and and and in just a moment because I'm actually very much in support of you on that. But I've done an exercise in the past where I've had a team go through their own website and try to purchase one of their products. And immediately they started to get frustrated, they started to get upset, they started to see all of these different things because in so many cases, it's just like, okay, well, you know, get this up there, put the put the checkout button, and it's gonna be easy. When we actually document the process, we start seeing the gaps, we start seeing those. So I think that is a powerful takeaway from our conversation that anybody can go, hey, when I'm training or teaching somebody to do something, I really need to document every step, document every potential, you know, I could go A or I could go B. Why I chose B, why I did this. And I think that that's a great thing. In relation to your facts, I am 100% in agreement with you. So if it does rub people the wrong way, you got at least one supporter and I got your back. Because when we look at facts, let's let's think about something, and I do this as an exercise sometimes. When we think about facts, let's say I see a fact. This person shows up late, they're not stepping up, they're not taking on assignments, they're maybe turning in work that's underperforming or anything else like that. Well, those facts create a story for me that that person's lazy. Well, there's a lot of different stories that could explain that. Maybe they weren't onboarded properly, maybe they're burned out, maybe they're having personal challenges, maybe they're struggling uh because they weren't given the prerequisite knowledge. There's a lot of stories that we could create to interpret those facts. So while those facts remain true, as you said, facts are important. There's an interpretation aspect to every single fact. That's true in science too. Even in research and methodological design, researchers still have to interpret, and this is why they try to get the bias out. So you've got a supporter, I've got your back on this. I do agree. Facts are important, but they're up to interpretation, and that interpretation can be really subjective.

Dalmo Cirne:

So And not only that, the interpretation, the explanation that you put to the facts, they cannot be easily variable. If you come up with an with an explanation that and someone challenges that and says, Oh, that is not what I meant to say, what I meant to say, and then you come up with a slight variation of that. If you can change your explanation that easily, that is also not a good explanation. A good explanation is that one that the person on the other side understands the why, what, when, how, and cannot be varied very easily. Um, we can everyone at least have has heard of Isaac Newton who came up with Newtonian physics and so on. It was wonderful for hundreds of years, it worked uh beautifully. But then there were things that would not be possible today, like a GPS. We would not be able to use a GPS for driving our cars. We put the phone, it connects to the car, and you have turn-by-turn navigation with Newtonian physics. That is not possible. And then came that other guy called Einstein, right? And came up with relativity, and it explains things better. It's not that Newton is BS, no, it's not, it was the best explanation we had at the time, that's beautiful, and worked beautifully, right? And we didn't have anything better. Then we came up with a better explanation, but Einstein had to go through a tremendous amount of work to say, hey, it is not just Newtonian physics, there is this area here we're not considering, and you see, here's how it works, right? So it's not that he easily changed his explanation. No, it was complex and built on top of that and came up with something very solid. Um there will be more explanations in the future. It is interesting how people try to forecast how the future is going to be, but it's based on a linear projection of the present. And that's never true, right? You can't project on knowledge, you don't know even it is going to exist. Something is going to be invented, new knowledge is gonna come up. And uh there's no way you can know today. If you knew, it would not be new knowledge, it would be current knowledge. So, all those um, there's another physician, uh, I think his name um Oh, it was Niels Bohr. Um, he says, uh forecasting. I'm paraphrasing over here, but it says, forecasting is very hard, especially if it's about the future.

Jay Johnson:

I love it. I you reminded me one of uh one of my mentors and colleagues, and uh was one of my bosses when I was working at Wayne State University, used to quote Yogi Berra, and the quote was the future ain't what it used to be. Which I think is you know, is is spot on to that. So yeah, let's let's talk a little bit about uh let's talk a little bit about one of the things that I I've seen in your work is the four streams of leadership. And while we may not have time to go deeply into these, I'd love to at least introduce those. Can you talk a little bit about that and share what are those streams and and what do they mean?

Dalmo Cirne:

That is the foundation of the framework I developed. Are those four streams because as you make the transition into management or leadership, or if you are a newly minted um leader, you tend to concentrate in just managing your team and your projects. That's where you know, as an individual contributor, you worked on that, and that's where you focus all your of your work, but that isn't complete. So the four streams begin with the first one managing yourself. What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, how do you manage core values, how do you establish what are the things that move you and eventually will move the team. The second one is managing downstream, which includes not only managing uh the team, the projects, and operations. Operations is sometimes left out and you're managing teams and projects, but you miss operations. So that is managing the second stream, the third stream is managing upstream. You're not telling your manager what to do, but that's an area where historically there have been problems on communication. How do you come up with a budget or acceptance for a new project? How do you provide status reports? How do you communicate effectively and have the channel open? Because if you're not communicating effectively, you, your team, your project, they are going to suffer, right? There's a lot of breakdowns that happen over there. The last and but not least uh stream is managing side stream. You will have several different peers where they will be in product management, they're going to be in legal, they're going to be in sales, in marketing. How do you work with those people? So you can see that stepping into a position of leadership and thinking that I'm going to manage my team and my project, that doesn't do you're going to be falling short in several dimensions. You do need to manage yourself. If you can't manage yourself, everything breaks down from there. You need to be able to manage downstream, you need to be able to manage upstream, and you need to be able to manage sidestream. And how you do each one of those streams, that's where we dive a little deeper in your book and start explaining how you do it, when you do it, and so on. We break down that process into minute details.

Jay Johnson:

I love it. So really living into your own philosophy of keeping those details and that structure. But I like the way that you frame that because I often think about, I often think about when I'm working with managers or leaders or anything else, they're usually only looking downstream to start. And I agree with you that sort of getting them to think about, hey, I've got to start with managing myself. How I show up is going to influence everything else. It's going to influence the sides, it's going to influence upstream, it's going to influence downstream. And if I'm not showing up in my authenticity, or if I'm not showing up in the way that I need to show up for my team, it's a non-starter. And the question that I would have for you and call this uh, you know, sort of the wrap-up. We have a lot of managers, leaders, HR people, coaches, trainers, consultants listening in here. How have you helped others shift their perspective? Because I think this is really important, is you start working with a leader, you start engaging with a team, and they're looking downstream. I think most people do. That's their starting point because, well, I'm a leader and I'm responsible for the downstream, and I'm gonna only look up to get guidance, not manage up. How do you start to shift their perspective about thinking about leading sideways, leading upwards, leading self? What does that process look like for you?

Dalmo Cirne:

Yeah, sometimes the best way to do it is with uh with an exercise or with a want that the person has. How many teams have you heard or have you worked with? They had an idea and they wanted to move forward with that feature or that product, and they got denied. And it was and you look and they explain it to you, and it was a wonderful product, but it gets the door shut. That is a communication upstream. How do you talk to them? How do you present that? But you cannot just go upstream and say, hey, my team had a brilliant idea, and here's what we want to do. That will break down. How about your current responsibilities? How about your existing projects, status reports? You cannot just forget about everything else that is going on and take this new project, right? Because it will feel like when you know, when the dog looks and sees a squirrel and says, Oh, squirrel, and start running the other way. It can't be because if it happens once, before that project is complete, there will be a new idea and it's gonna go to the next project. So you wind up with 10 projects, all of them 90 90% finished, none of them done, and guess what? One pro one complete project is worth 10 projects that are unfinished or mid-air, right? Or a hundred projects that are mid-air. How do you create those status reports? How do you show about the bandwidth of the team? What are your expectations that that work was going to be done in the next quarter? Then here comes the new project. How would you implement that? Let's do a practical exercise. People could take home today. Imagine like the CPU of a computer is constantly fetching instructions to execute, right? And there's a pipe of instructions. If that pipe is not filled with instructions, the CPU has to sit over there waiting for new instructions to be fetched and put to be executed. Um the great programming language is the ones that can fill that pipe as much as possible. So the CPU is constantly busy. Let's translate that into our day-to-day. How do we operate with the team? We can make that pipe analogous to a backlog. But if you go and fetch a task from the backlog, but the task is not defined or fully defined to do the work, someone is going to get that task from the backlog and say, Oh, it's not complete. I have to go and talk to someone else, I have to go and do this. Instead, work the manager, the product manager, whomever needs to be involved, work on completing everything in the documentation of that task. When people pick those tasks to be executed, that could be engineers, could be people from legal, could be anyone responsible for that task. If they are shovel ready, they will get the task and going, get the task and keep going. You're not asking anyone to work any harder, you're not asking anyone to work any longer, you're not asking anyone to do anything different, right? Because people say you need to work smarter. Well, what does it mean?

Jay Johnson:

Are you calling me incompetent, dumb? Yeah, whatever.

Dalmo Cirne:

Um, but no, you can say if you prepare the tasks and they're ready to be picked up, let's say you have a modest 10% gain in productivity, and let's say you can work on 40 tasks per year. A year has 52 weeks, let's say, and you have like some weeks on vacation, some weeks you take off and holidays, and let's say a solid 40 productive weeks in a year, and you can do one task per week. I'm just doing a back of the envelope calculations over here, and you have a 10% gain in productivity. Now we are talking about people working no harder than before, no longer than before, having a productivity boost. If you are a startup, that could put you ahead of the game of all your competition. If you are a larger company, you can ship products and you can remain relevant for much longer. You have more productivity from your employees without having to work them to burn out and to an uncomfortable situation, right? All of that just by optimizing the tasks in your backlog to be ready to be executed by whomever is going to be responsible for that. That productivity gain, you didn't ask anyone to move any mountains, yet you can clearly see a gain in productivity.

Jay Johnson:

That's so powerful. You know, it's it's funny. You you reminded me, we used to have a joke um in my company was we were really good at getting to the 10-yard line. And then we'd just stop. It'd be like, hey, we got we're we're at the 10-yard line, it's practically a goal. Don't worry about it. And uh, you know, this was something but it was something where you're absolutely right. The completeness of a process and the completeness of a project or task, one completed project is better than 10 open ones that are at the 10-yard line. So I think that's a great takeaway. And definitely something that when we think about when we're shifting behaviors in the workplace, really focusing our energy and attention on something that's going to give us that 10%, you know, boost, getting through that first, getting that completed. Because that 10%, while it is only a 10%, it's exponential. It creates the conditions for long-term impact. And I think you said that beautifully. So, Dalmo, if if our audience, this has been incredible. And if our audience wanted to get in touch with you, how would they reach out to you?

Dalmo Cirne:

There are a few ways. One I would like to invite everyone to go to my website is dalmoscerne.com, D A L M O C I R N E.com. From there, you can find links to my social net, social media presence. You can find lots of articles. I just published one today. Uh, you can also find me on X, LinkedIn, and other uh social uh medias. On my website, you can also book a conversation with me and send me an email. I reply to all my messages. So feel free if I have a question, you have something you want to talk about, send me a message. I will reply to that.

Jay Johnson:

Incredible. So very easy to get you. And we'll get that into the show notes just in case anybody wants to reach out and ask those questions. Because it has been a joy to sit here and ask you questions and to learn from you. And I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to share your wealth of experience, your knowledge, and some really practical takeaways that I think that people can implement tomorrow in the workplace. So thank you so much, Dalmo.

Dalmo Cirne:

Well, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. This conversation was an absolute blast.

Jay Johnson:

I love to hear that. So, and thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge. We're together, we're shaping workforce behaviors.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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