Episode 208: Don’t Ask for a Lighter Load. The Secret to Professional Accountability w/ Dalmo Cirne

We walk through the Four Streams of Leadership—reservoir, downstream, upstream, and side stream—and show how leadership is a continuous flow. Reservoir is self-management: values, habits, and the reflection that keeps you steady under pressure. Downstream is team and operations: assembling roles, setting standards, and maintaining momentum. Upstream is partnering with your boss and senior leaders: aligning priorities and preventing strategic drift. Side stream is collaborating with peers: building shared commitments and removing cross-team friction. When each stream runs clean, you move faster with fewer surprises.

• reframing the Peter Principle as unpreparedness
• replacing stories with explanatory frameworks and exercises
• defining the four streams: reservoir, downstream, upstream, side stream
• building a culture that holds when we are absent
• habits to fill the reservoir: reading, audiobooks, feedback loops
• composing teams with visionaries, implementers, and closers
• interviewing for role fit through consistent depth
• timing process for discovery versus reliability
• making disagreement and commitment possible with a clear why
• further reading influences: Popper, Feynman, Deutsch
• where to learn more and get the book

Hiring and team design get specific through three vital roles: visionaries who define the problem and direction, implementers who build the thing, and closers who ship it. Too many visionaries means swirl; too few closers means value never lands. We share interviewing tactics that probe for consistent depth across envisioning, building, and finishing, so you can place people where they thrive. Then we tackle the third rail—process. Early on, heavy process kills discovery; after product-market fit, light process kills reliability. We map the why, when, what, and how of process so your team can innovate without chaos and deliver without drift. Along the way, we unpack “disagree and commit” the right way: explain the why, or you’ll get “disagree and resent.”

If you’re ready to trade fables for frameworks and build a culture that acts the right way when you’re not in the room, this conversation is your field guide. Subscribe, share with a manager who just took the leap, and leave a quick review to tell us which framework you’ll try first.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 Dalmo Cirne👇
➡️ 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝𝐈𝐧 (primary): https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalmocirne/

➡️ 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞:  https://dalmocirne.com/

➡️ 𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1510785183

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Transcript

Aligning People And Company Goals

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you dive deeper, ask honest questions. You're not really the person you're not interested with this line of them. You're just trying to get true right into how to match the person with what the company wants to do. Because if you have an overlap between what the company wants to do and the person wants to do, the more those circles overlap, the better line you have, right? So that's what you're trying to optimize for. It won't have to be perfect. That will be only an ideal world. The more you can overlap, if the company gets better results, the person gets better for filming life and more professional realization. So part of your job is also trying to make those circles overlap as much as you can.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

I'm excited about this conversation today because he's going to challenge the notion that leadership is an art and that there's ultimately uh some math behind it, some science behind it, but ultimately where some of the current literature, if you will, uh misses in terms of helping us to become more effective as leaders and managers in our work. So I'm a certain welcome to the Uncommon Leader Podcast. Great to have you on the show today. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

I'm doing fantastic. And it's great to be here. John, I was looking forward to this conversation for the longest time.

The Peter Principle Reframed

SPEAKER_00 1:53

It's going to be cool. And here we go. I mean, the listeners ultimately want to know, okay. The leaders, especially the ones that are listening right now, some of them are going into or aspire to be in new leadership roles. Yet when they get into those new leadership roles that they haven't led a team before, they often run into some barriers. What have you seen in your preparation and writing this book here that's been the biggest barrier for uh leaders going into a new management position?

From Stories To Usable Frameworks

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Let's go back in time a little bit to 1969. So there was a gentleman who wrote a fantastic book. His name was Lawrence Peter, and he wrote a book called The Peter Principle. I recommend everyone to read the book. It's uh it's a timeless book. And I'm not going to do justice over here, so don't hate me because I'm oversimplifying. Uh, but in the Peter Principle, it says you get promoted to your level of becoming incompetent, but that doesn't add up. You spend your whole life working on something, you do your best, you develop your craft. Now, one fine day, because you got promoted, you become incompetent. That doesn't make sense. What really makes sense is you went to a position where you are unprepared to be there. You're still competent, but you don't know what you're supposed to do. You're not prepared to take that job. When you're trying to fix the problem of being incompetent, it's a solvable problem, but it's a very hard problem to solve. However, when you are unprepared, that's a much easier problem to solve. We can work with you because you bring your competency and you say, the skills now are different. Here's what is expected from you. Here are the frameworks available to you for you to then exceed those expectations. Working through that problem and putting people in a position where now they are able to do their jobs effectively, that is the greatest thing in my realization, right? I went through those problems myself. And I think that now with the book, I can give back to people and help them be prepared to step into that position of leadership and be effective at doing their jobs.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, that was one of the things that I know we'll getting into as we talk about those frameworks. I'm pretty, pretty excited about that. Because actually, not only are you talking about those leaders that are going into new roles, but I hear you also talking to those leaders who are putting people into those positions and how we get them ready as well. Look, I've worked in healthcare consulting for about 10 years, and I observe it all the time. That industry, if you will, and I'm talking about especially the clinical side, are phenomenal at recognizing where the best physicians are, where the best cardiologists are, or whether the best dermatologists are. And they love to promote them into leadership positions and not prepare them to be leaders because they were the best at what they were doing. And it makes it so difficult. So I'm looking forward to having part of that conversation. But you also touched on that you've experienced some of this. So let's take you back in time a little bit more, maybe kind of that Peter Prince Well, I'm we'll go, we're kind of close in aid. I'm not gonna try to guess anything about age and things like that, but take me back to your childhood, Domin, and ultimately give me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are today as a person or as a leader.

Why The Book Lives On Your Desk

SPEAKER_01 5:22

So a little more than childhood and more into the teenager years. So I was inside of an airplane, and it was a perfectly functioning airplane. Suddenly, someone opened the door and started jumping, and I went and jumped after, and uh, and it was thrilling and it was awesome, and I did that twice more. So, three times I jumped out of a perfectly functioning airplane without the big with a bag on your back kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

But yeah, exactly. I mean, you're like, what are we doing?

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Exactly, right? So when you describe like that, it it sounds very different from oh, I went skydiving, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Absolutely.

Sponsors And Personal Branding Break

The Four Streams Of Leadership

Building Culture That Survives Absence

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Uh but it it those are lessons that help you overcome either fears or things that you thought you couldn't do, then you go and do it. In life, you end up being the accumulation of many experiences and they connect to each other, sometimes in a way that are not like immediately apparent to you, but somehow they carry, they stay with you throughout your life and affect you in one way or another. So, my experiences of having jumped from an airplane would mean something different to another person, right? That brings back to one story on the book I wanted to talk about is what you see in many leadership books is that they are their content, they have a powerful message over there, but they also mix with some stories, right? And they tell stories that are wonderful, and you want to read those stories, see how the person went through it, overcome the obstacles, and come to the end, but then what is in there for you? Because you don't have the same life experiences as the author, uh, the stories are gonna mean something different to you. But what ends up is you don't connect the moral of that story to your life experiences and to how you perform your job day to day. It's like reading Aesop fables, right? They all have a moral of the story, not necessarily you can translate to your work. And I try to operate in a different well, I didn't try, I operate in a different framework, and that is reflected in the book where instead of telling a story, I explain the framework. I'm a big believer in the explanatory knowledge. If you can't explain something, you don't really understand or master that craft. So I base the frameworks on explanatory knowledge, samples, and exercises, so those you can derive immediately from the book, apply to your life that day or the day after, right? So you're not going to see stories in the book because in those stories, one, you never go back to reread those stories. You already know how they end. And unless you have the same experiences as the author, you don't connect the dots in the moral of those stories to how you apply to that. So I move away from those stories, which they call them fillers for the books. And I come with a book where I prefer people to have the book where they learn the framework and they keep the book on their desks as reference material rather than okay, put on a shelf, it's there. Oh, I read it. I want to go back and see how do I redo this, how to create that status report again. Let me see the sample, let me do the exercise. Uh, that's where I see people drain drive value from the knowledge in the book and other experiences.

Filling Your Reservoir: Reading And Feedback

SPEAKER_00 8:58

I love the idea behind just keeping on your desk as a reference. One of the questions I often ask is that book test. What do you want them to do when they're done reading the book, right? Because to your point, behind us, if you're folks are watching on YouTube, you see the books on our shelves and you can see the backing and things like that, but they end up on the shelf, much like a leadership seminar or a management seminar you go to, and we don't go back to them. To your point, when they see that backing, you'd like them to say there's a framework in there that I need to use, and I want to pull that back out and create my own story as well in terms of what goes there. Look, I get that you're a mathematician, is what you are. And I love that there is, uh there are, excuse me, uh, equations in the back. I mean, it almost made me gave me a little bit of chills, taking me back to college with some of the integrals and some of the limits and some of the sums that you're creating on your equations to identify and build those frameworks. So I think folks will have fun when they read your book as well, uh, if they allow that to be there for them, if they allow that framework idea to say, how do I try this out? And let's go into the first basic one that you talked about really inside that book, and that's the four streams. So you chose to use this word stream. What are the four streams and why did you choose to use the word stream instead of maybe a traditional book like the four steps or the four levels or the four methods? Tell me about that.

Downstream Management: Team Composition

SPEAKER_01 10:17

For that, I do have a very good story, and it's a real story, and we will learn why the book is called The Four Streams of Leadership and could not have been called anything else. In leadership management, uh, you constantly you are in a constant flow of activities. Those activities are coming at you, or you are generating those activities, but just like a perennial river, there is always that flow going. It's like a stream or a river, right? And there are four basic uh directions where we are addressing the first one. I call the reservoir, you're managing yourself. It's the the first thing you have to learn how to manage, establishing what are your strengths, your weaknesses, core values. There's a lot to work over there. The second stream is downstream, that's where you're managing your team, you're managing projects, and you're managing operations. The third stream, you're managing upstream, you're not telling your manager what to do, but there's a lot of work to be done together, right? You're going working together, and uh it's a historical area where communication breaks down, where because of the hierarchy, there is intimidation or people are shy, and you end up not doing what needs to be done, and uh there are consequences for not doing that. And the fourth and last stream is side stream, you're working with your peers, holding each other accountable, you're working on a sales team, how do we market this product? What is the message we're going to bring to the service or a widget that we are building? Right, there's work to be done in all of them. When you have these streams and four directions that you work in, those are the four streams of leadership, right? You need to be able to, what are those core areas, how to work with them, and how do you manage the constant flow of activities that will be either coming at you or you will be generating them, right? There was no other way of calling the book anything else.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Love that. I think that the those four streams really, and I love the the pictures uh that that create in your mind as well when you think about it. You use the term reservoir for develop self, and I believe that is the first step in every leader's journey as well, is that they've got to be developing their their own competencies, their own skills. Because if they rely on someone else, that they may or may not get that done. What's a way that you I think as a reservoir, it's like filling up your reservoir so that you have it to use. What's a way that you fill up your reservoir on a regular basis? What's the discipline that you have that helps you do that?

Visionaries, Implementers, And Closers

SPEAKER_01 13:08

So, culture is is an interesting thing because culture hates a vacuum, right? If you don't establish a culture, it will be established for you. If you are working within a company, the company will have its own culture, but your team will have that own subculture inside of the company. And culture is not going out for a Peter and drink and playing ping pong, or that is not culture at all. You are socializing, you're but that's not establishing culture. I like to define culture as what happens when you are not in the room. For example, you are absent, some problem happened, the systems were down, customer has a problem, the product is not functioning, there is a downtime. How do people react? Is the outcome aligned with what you have done? It doesn't have to be exactly with what you have done. Is the result aligned with with what you would have done? Right? If the answer is yes, you have a strong culture where people take actions and they act with their their vectors or the direction where they're acting is aligned with what you're doing. So you establish a culture where the actions that happen and the people in that culture, they're all in alignment, even in your absence, the outcomes would be very similar.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

Well, you touch on that in even in your uh description, you talk about leading a team or growing a team from three to more than 30 team members in your in one of your uh recent leadership roles. But what have you done specifically to develop your own reservoir? How do you are you a reader? What are habits that you have that make you more effective on a regular basis to fill yours?

Interviewing For Role Fit

Process: Why, When, What, How

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Reading goes without saying, right? You do constantly uh be reading. I jokingly posted online, I think like maybe a year ago. If you want to read more, get a dog. Doesn't make sense immediately, right? But as you, you're wearing uh headphones, right? So you get you take your dog for a walk and you put your headphones on. There are some audiobooks that are fantastic. Some books you have to sit down and read them and you have to turn the pages, they are more you need to be more absorbed into the book. But other books, they are they are great for uh in the audio format. Then your dog loves it because you go for longer walks, and you love it because you are immersed into listening or reading a book. So if you want to read more, get a dog. So reading is one of those things. Another is more it's almost a necessity of life. And I want to open a parenthesis over here to come back to it, but I want to draw an analogy. Imagine you are driving in a highway, you're trying to keep your lane, so you're at the steering wheel and you're constantly moving a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, because you get the feedback. If your car is drifting a little bit to one side or the other side, you correct that and you're trying to keep like that middle space within your lane. So you need that feedback loop so we can make the adjustments. The same thing matters, and I'm closing the parenthesis now or back to the reservoir. You need that feedback loop, right? In talking to people, listen, rereading or listening to books, and you have to have a mechanism where your actions come with the feedback and you can do a little bit of course correction in the where you are going. Without that feedback loop, without that signal, you will not know how to correct where to go, and uh, you will be under the impression that everything you do is correct because there's no way, there's no other way to evaluate that. So establishing that mechanism, are my ideas correct, not where can I check them against talk to other people, peers, mentors, reading, all of that.

Disagree And Commit Versus Resent

SPEAKER_00 17:12

It's so important, you know, and one of the, at least in some of my teaching as a coach, I might you know call that a formal reflection process, but ultimately it's like sitting down and self-evaluation of what's going well, what could be going better in my day, in my week, in my leadership. And to your point, course correcting, I think about things like what do I need to keep doing, start doing, and stop doing, right? I mean, I need to, you know, even the driving analogy works really well in terms of giving you that feedback. And sometimes you've got a car, a newer car that'll give you that feedback. It'll shake the steering wheel. But many times you've got to be able to shake that steering wheel yourself. The car giving you that feedback is also much like how do I ask my team to let me know how I'm doing as well, and getting feedback from the team. Certainly, your scoreboard is going to give you that feedback too. So I love that regular reflection that goes along with it. How do you start talking about then? Let's talk about downstream. So, what's a framework that you help managers get ready to improve their ability to lead downstream with their teams? And common leaders. Hope you're enjoying the episode so far. I believe in doing business with people you like and trust and not just a company name. That's what a strong personal brand is essential, whether you're an entrepreneur or a leader within a company. Brand Builders Group, the folks who have been helping me refine my own personal brand, are offering a free consultation call with one of their expert brand strategists. They'll help you identify your uniqueness, craft a compelling story, and develop a step-by-step plan to elevate your impact. So head on over to CoachJohnGallagher.com slash BBG, as in brand builders group, to schedule your free call and take the first step toward building a personal brand that gets you noticed for all the right reasons. That's coachjongallagher.com slash BBG. Now, let's get back to the episode. Developer teams.

Influences: Popper, Feynman, Deutsch

SPEAKER_01 18:55

So I know you love sports, right? And when you're assembling a team, you cannot put all players playing one position. It would not end up well. In assembling a team, you you can't put everyone in the same position either. You have to assemble a team with a purpose. And for the majority of cases, I think that there are three core, three fundamental positions for you to recruit and assemble your team around those positions. The first one is a visionary. And I'm including the manager itself in the pool of those people. The first is a visionary. A visionary is a person who can identify and see the problem and imagine how a product or a service can be built to serve that problem, right? The second role, and you can imagine that you don't need many visionaries because otherwise you end up with too many cooks in the kitchen.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Too many ideas.

Why Write This Book Now

Where To Learn More And Buy

The Billboard: Stronger Shoulders

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Exactly. But you need some, perhaps more than one, but less than a hundred, somewhere in between. You need the people implementing the work. Those are people say, I know how to implement this part, I know how to go from a concept from what the product should be, I know how to implement that and build a product around that. So you need more people who are implementing, they are building the product, they are implementing the service. The thing is, those people are really attracted to new problems. And that's when you need the third leg, let's say, in the stool of those people assembling the team, which are the forwarders, the people who close the the deal, right? Because if you have 10 products and they're all 90% finished, and you say, Trust me, they're going to be awesome. What is the value of those 10 products? Zero, because you can't commercialize, you can't serve customers with those products. One product finished across the finish line, it is worth 10 products mid-air. So you do need to finalize, you need to say, Here, I finished the product, put a bow on top, and is ready to go and deploy to customers. That's one version, right? You're going to always create and prove new versions of the product. And you can imagine a distribution of those people. You have a few visionaries, you have more, the bulk of the people are going to be more than implementers, and you have a few more, more than visionaries, but a few less than implementers. You have the people, the forwarders, the closers of the job, because they are not satisfied until they push the product across the finish line. The people implementing, they're going to see a new project. Oh, shiny. They will go away with that, right? When you are assembling your team, be very mindful. Who are you in interviewing for the team? Which roles do you want to assign to those people on your team? That would be incredibly important. That assignment will also be fundamental in developing the culture of the team, right? We're talking about establishing the culture as the reservoir. You know that water it mixes with water from other places, right? It doesn't stay confined in just one place. So work that you develop in one area trickles down to different areas. In assembling the team, you're also assembling part of how the culture will be established. So if you have someone who is really good at throwing a ball, there's going to be a quarterback. If someone is really good at running and catching, you wouldn't put that person as the quarterback. It's going to be more like uh some other position in basketball and other teams as well. The same is true for assembling your team for the projects you're managing, for your company, for the projects you manage.

Closing Thanks And Subscribe

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Yeah, you touch on that too, because I love that as a framework. You've got to have the visionaries, got to have the implementers, got to have the closers ultimately, those forwarders that need to bring it across. And looking at the composition of your team is very important because you touch on this in one of the, excuse me, in the uh making checking my note here, then the afterword of the book is that you know the search for talent is a steep uphill battle. And not all of your visionaries are going to have the same skills as a closer. If you have all visionaries, to your point, we're just going to be talking a lot about ideas and never get anything done. Or if you had all implementers, you know, you only get 90% of the way and you think you're done, you're like, yeah, that feels pretty good. But you got to have guys that are going to get it across the finish line for you as well to make that happen. How do you work with uh you know your team to identify that talent, to identify each one? What are some of the ways you identify that?

SPEAKER_01 23:30

One, everyone on the team will likely play all three roles, but some people will be predominantly a visionary or a closer, and perhaps the manager is the closer, or perhaps the manager is the visionary, or the implementer. So you're accounting for everyone on the team to identify those people. There's a technique used in interviewing, uh, sometimes by law enforcement, sometimes in I I worked for a while with the Department of Defense, so I end up going through some of the trainings around that. But when you're talking to someone in interviewing to know if their stories are true, imagine, for example, I have kids, and they say on a Friday night they went to the movies. And I say, Did you really go to the movies? How how can I tell if you went to the movie? And I can start asking questions to go deeper and deeper in the subject and say, Well, which car did you drive, or did you go with someone else? What movie did you pick? Oh, you bought popcorn with or without butter, right? And you say, Oh, did you leave at the end of the movie or in the end? What was the movie about? And you start asking more and more detailed questions. Later, you can come back and ask the same question or a different question about the same topic, and they have to be consistent.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

If they actually went to the movie and got the popcorn, they were able to answer all those questions consistently. But if they were not able to answer the questions consistently, you know that, well, you went somewhere, but it wasn't to the movies.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

I thought you were gonna tell me you're gonna look at their fingers, see if there's butter on their fingers, kind of thing. You're going that you're looking for the consistency of the story, which is kind of funny.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Someone being able to vision uh envision a product, you can start diving deeper as how you would envision this, what is your implementation, and you keep diving deeper and deeper on the vision part, the implementation part, the closing part, and see how the person reacts the answers. Because if their vocation is more on that area, it will become clear. Even if their vocation is a different one, you cannot reassign them to be, for example, someone you thought it was a forwarder to be a vision area, because during the interview that became apparent. But as you dive deeper, ask honest questions, you're not grilling the person, you're not interviewing with the spotlight on them, and you're just trying to get what is true, right? And to how to best match the person with what the company wants to do. Because if you have an overlap between what the company wants to do and the person wants to do, the more those circles overlap, the better alignments you have, right?

SPEAKER_02 26:11

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

So that's what you're trying to optimize for. It will never be perfect. That would be only in an ideal world, right? The more you can overlap, the better. It's the company gets better results, the person gets better fulfillment in life and more professional realization. So part of your job is also trying to make those circles overlap as much as you can.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Absolutely. You know, it's funny as I look at your uh afterward as well. I've fallen into one of the traps that you mentioned, right in one of the paragraphs. You say most management books focus on one stream, more often than not, that's downstream. How we're working on developing our team. Absolutely. But effective managers are also adept at managing the upstream, side stream, and the reservoir. So, what's different about your book, and here's another framework that I'd like you to touch on, you said this book addresses the why, what, when, and how of management. How does it address that? Tell me, tell me about the why, what, when, and how. Because that seems like something that's very important to you as you look at this.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

So let's talk about profanities in business, processes. It's something that is universally disliked. You say the P-word of a process is almost a profanity in business. People say, Oh, why this? But a better way to look at that is why is the process there? And when should we apply that?

unknown 27:25

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

The reason to establish a process is when you want to have reproducible results on a widget, a product or a service that you are building, right? You are serving customers. Imagine you buy a new automobile and you don't want to get, oh, am I lucky one to get the one that was assembled well? Or no, I trust this company, whichever model I pick is going through all the quality assurance, and I will get a good car. So I imagine that everyone wants to get a reliable good car from a reliable good company. So that's when you establish processes, is to say, I want to have predictable, reproducible results. Let's go back to the reality of companies. If you are a young company and you're still looking at product market fit, you're iterating fast, and if you establish processes over there, now you are ossify your ability to iterate fast and find product market fit and come up with new ideas, new versions of the product. It is necessary for you to be as free of processes as possible because you are experimenting on what works and what doesn't. But once you reach product market fit, if you don't establish processes, now the results you are producing or giving to customers are inferior. If it's a widget, maybe a widget was built well, others not. If it's a service, now you have downtime coming up frequently. Some other times it worked a whole week without a problem. Now you want to establish processes to have those reproducible results, right? That's one way we can talk about when to apply. Applied processes too early, you're working against yourself. Apply too late, you're working against your customers. Either or you lose. Why apply processes? Well, now we we discussed why a process is done to get those reliable, reproducible results. What is done? Why it depends on your product, right? And how to do it, that's how we implement the steps on the process to get your results. Being able to explain why you need something is a fundamental necessity of I'm going to open another parenthesis over here. We all probably have heard the famous phrase disagree and commit. But why that? And if you say disagree and commit, if I can't understand the why the disagreement, I will not be able to commit. If you and I are discussing something and uh you have a better explanation than mine, and you say, I heard your position, but here's why we're going to do it differently. So the disagree and commit, I may even not be 100% on your way of doing things, but now I understand why you are so convicted that that's the way to do it, I can disagree and commit. Otherwise, if I don't understand, I will disagree and resent instead of commit. The explanatory knowledge on how you do things, so you own that to your team. It doesn't mean that you're ruling by consensus or you're voting by committee, not at all. But you're giving people the chance to understand here is why we are going forward this way, so you can understand the reasons that is the foundation for that action or that decision, right? That's when disagree and commit become possible. Otherwise, what you're creating is an environment of disagree and resent, and you don't want that.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

That's right. You want to think about that, Damon. I spot on with regards to certainly with regards to process and the timing of process. I mean, when you have a larger company who has established their product or service that's there, yet you don't have processes that document my word, standard work, the way we do things really well today, it results in variation. Uh, it results in uh noise, it results in poor quality, whatever those things are. When you don't document them and have that. I had a client who I went out and looked at several of their job sites in terms of working on these things. I said, What did you think? They just asked me what I thought. I said, once I've seen one job, I've seen one job. And that's that, you know, startup company phase that, you know, things are going to be a little bit different. But at some point, if you're going to increase the value and scale your business, you've got to have processes in place that are going to allow you to become even better. I appreciate that. I love how you've kind of uh brought that into those frameworks of all four of those streams. And as you go through that, is there a, you know, with the books behind your desk, you talked about the Peter Principle from 1969. My guess that's not the only book that you've read. Has there been a writer uh that's influenced the way you write or that you try to emulate when you're writing, or has there been a book that's impacted you uh a good bit in your personal development?

SPEAKER_01 32:19

There are. And uh none of those writers are from this space of leadership and management. One is no longer with us, is an Austrian philosopher called Karl Popper. He was a big proponent of explanatory knowledge. It was explanatory knowledge is also what made Richard Feynman very well, very prolific in what he did and also very amicable because you could speak to Feynman and he would explain things to you in terms that pretty much anyone could understand. The second one is David Deutsch. He's still with us. He wrote a fantastic book called The Beginning of Infinity, is a book about everything. And it's the beginning of infinity because it doesn't matter where you are in infinity, that is the beginning, right? It extends to infinity in all directions. But it talks about epistemology, it talks about science, it talks about uh multiverse, it talks about quantum mechanics in a way that is accessible to everyone who wants to read the book. Those two people they are very strong proponents of this framework of information having explanatory power. That principle is core to all the work I do. So those two writers were tremendously influential.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Very influential, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:37

Uh, but also at the end of my book, I I do suggest further reading. They're like fantastic people who created like phenomenally good pieces of work.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

The book that you wrote, you've got three decades of experience in putting teams together, uh different fields that you've worked in. Why was now the right time for you to write this book?

SPEAKER_01 33:56

So now actually started about a decade ago. So the book is a decade in the making. The 30 years of experience is mixed between individual contributor and then the transition into leadership and management, right? As you make the transition, many of the problems, if not all the problems described in the book, I've been through that. I've been in those shoes, I suffered, I struggled, I went through those problems. And before trying to solve those problems myself, I asked, did someone else solve those problems? And sure, yeah, some people did, but none of them were what I wanted to propose as a solution. As we were talking in the beginning of this conversation, many of the leadership books, one, they are talking to the C-suite level. My book is more talking to the middle management level and how you learn the ropes. And two, you have a bunch of those filler stories. The filler stories, they make you feel wonderful. You get inspired by them. But the reality is, end of the day, they amount to nothing. Right because you can't connect the dots, you can't apply them to your job. So it was a wonderful moment of entertainment, but it amounts to nothing. So I wanted to create something that is different that says, here's knowledge, here are lessons, here's explanatory knowledge attached to it, and here are samples and exercises you can apply today. That is the principle why the book is so different from what you find out there.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

Hence the why you said again, you want this one not to sit on the shelf, but you want to sit beside them on the desk as well, in terms of what's there. Hey, thank you for that. And you've got it coming out soon. I believe by the time this episode comes out, it will actually be released. Where do you want folks to go to learn more about you, Dalmo, and about the book as well? Where do you want them to go to get the book?

SPEAKER_01 35:52

I'd love to invite everyone to visit my website, dalmoserne.com, spelled D-A-L-M-O-C-I-R-N-E.com. From there, you find links to where to buy the book. You can schedule a conversation with me. If you're not ready for a conversation, there's a place for you to send me a message. You can I reply to all messages. So if you want to continue this conversation, please reach out. There are links as well to articles, essays, social network, and everything. From my website, you can branch out and go everywhere else.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

But that's the main hub, and we'll put that link in the show notes to make that happen. Tomo, you've done a great job explaining the value behind your book and why you wrote it, uh, the frameworks that go along with it. I know we didn't touch everything. That's why I want to send folks to your website so that they can see uh the other frameworks that you talk about. You can't possibly talk about all of them on a podcast episode, and you don't want to. You want them to buy the book, which is a really good thing. So I appreciate you sharing with the listeners of the Uncommon Leader podcast. I know they are going to have found value. My last question to you that I use with all of my first-time guests, and certainly it helps with authors, is to ask you, though, I'm going to give you a billboard. You can put that billboard anywhere you want to. If you put it at the Denver, Colorado Airport, it's one of the busiest in the country. They're going to see that. But doesn't matter where you put it. What's going to be the message that you put on that billboard for those you want to read your book and why do you put that message on?

SPEAKER_01 37:24

I'm not the creator of this message, uh, but I find it very important, and I want to paraphrase because I can't attribute ownership. I don't know who wrote this message, but it stays with me. That uh don't give me a lighter load, give me stronger shoulders. It uh it tells about you being accountable for you're not evading accountability, you're being responsible and accountable to your work. You're doing things, you're moving forward with it, so you're not shying away from your responsibilities, you're asking for stronger shoulders to carry them forward.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

Excellent. Dalmo, thank you again so much for bringing and adding value to the listeners. Uh, I wish you the best in the book launch. Hope it goes great for you. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Thank you so much. It was a fantastic conversation.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

Hey uncommon leaders, thanks for joining in for the conversation today with Dalmo Sernay about his book, The Four Streams of Leadership. I think there's some real nuggets there that we can learn from, and you've probably heard one of those things that you need to share with somebody else. So please do that. Again, that's how we get it into the hands of many more uncommon leaders like you. If you get a chance and you really appreciate that, or just podcast it, hit that subscribe button so you get a copy of each of the new ones that comes out every week, and then you won't have to worry about finding it each time that it comes out. Until next time, go and grow champions.