Unlocking Modern Work: Mark Cruth on Curiosity, Collaboration, and Making Change Stick

In this episode of Catalysts, I sit down with Mark Cruth, Principal Modern Work Coach at Atlassian, to explore what it really takes to create effective, energized, and high-performing teams in today’s complex world of work.

Mark is a keynote speaker, collaboration coach, and one of the leading voices in the future of teamwork—internally at Atlassian and across the broader industry. He’s helped shape how 16,000+ employees at Atlassian operate while also empowering countless other organizations to rethink how teams learn, grow, and lead.

We unpack:

• How Atlassian scaled its culture from 2,000 to 16,000 people
• The secret to decentralized decision-making (and why most orgs get it wrong)
• What makes Atlassian’s Team Playbook such a powerful operating tool
• Why curiosity—not content—is the future of learning
• The evolving role of the facilitator in an AI-powered workplace
• How team learning creates deeper trust, faster behavior change, and longer-lasting results
• Why visibility matters for leaders—and how to show up without selling out
• The one mindset shift every emerging leader should make to spark change

If you care about how teams work—and how learning can accelerate that work—this is an energizing, practical, and deeply human conversation you don’t want to miss.

🔗 Connect with Mark on LinkedIn or at markcruth.com

🔍 Explore the Atlassian Team Playbook: atlassian.com/team-playbook

Connect & Learn More

• Connect on with me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jacob-ratliff
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• Interested in joining the show as a guest? Click here!

Transcript

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Hey there and welcome to Catalysts, the leaders shaping the future of learning and growth. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and this is the show where we spotlight the bold thinkers, builders, leaders and drivers who aren't just responding to change in our industry. They're the ones who are making it happen. And today I'm super excited to be joined by Mark Ruth, who is the principal modern work coach at Atlassian. He's one of the most energized and insightful voices I've seen when it comes to reimagining how teams work. Whether he's coaching leaders on uh collaboration, keynoting at global conferences, or shaping the future of work from inside Atlassian, he really brings this blend of practicality, storytelling, and honestly this kind of contagious enthusiasm. to everything that he does. And selfishly, Atlassian is a company I've long admired for not only their really people first approach, but also their commitment to doing remote work right. And in this episode, we're going to explore the future of learning, evolution of leadership, and what it takes to create a lasting impact. Not. just inside an organization, but across the industry as a whole. Mark, thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm really excited to have you. Jacob, I'm super excited to be here. I love that introduction. I literally want to record that and I'll use that for all my introductions. uh I know, right? It's funny in my LinkedIn, if people go to my LinkedIn, you'll see in my headline, I put golden retriever in there and everyone's like, do you have a golden retriever? I'm like, I do not actually. don't have one. says, but the thing is, is I've been described as a golden retriever puppy by more than one of my clients over the years and they're like, your energy and you're just all over the place. And that's like, we love it. And I'm like, you know, I'm gonna lean in to that title. Yeah, absolutely. I fully support that. So let's go ahead and dive in. um So you're the principal modern work coach at Atlassian, which I mentioned just a second ago. What does that mean? I love that question. because people look at that and they're like, oh, that's kind of cool. But what do you do? And the thing is, it's I like to say it's one of the it's the best made up role I've ever had in my career. And it really is. It's one where I kind of was given carte blanche of the space when I when I entered in. They says, what do you want to do? And I actually have a career based in on a lot of technical coaching, a lot of working with technical teams. And I was like, The problems we face today are more than just technology teams. It's every team out there. And we're dealing, and we were entering into this new modern age of work. And I'm like, you know what I want to do? I said, I want to be a modern work coach. Like I want to focus in on how we work, not just in one sector, but across all teams. And that's what I've really spent the last, you know, I've been at Atlassian for almost six years, but really for the last three years, I focused very heavily on those things you mentioned. I work very closely with a number of our customers, working with those C-suite teams and middle managers, helping them figure out how do we create more innovative, inclusive, engaging environments for our people to really do their best work. I go out there in a keynote at a number of events. I go and share what we do at Atlassian. It's a big part of my role is not just talk about our products. Tools are tools today, but what makes Atlassian different. our actual ways of working. So I go out there and I share what those are, share our stories. And then I get to also go inside and inside Atlassian and actually spend some time helping new teams kind of come up on and about the fun fact that we'd like to share about Atlassian is when I joined back in 2019, we were, what was that about 2000 people today were about 16,000 people, which blows my mind. It's one of those things where like we just had that immense growth. And of course with that, comes the shepherding in of new people. And part of my role I look at is to help our new teams kind of come up and learn a little bit about Atlassian and learn about ways of working and actually help to continue to inject those across your organization. So it's a great role. have a ton of, you know, I get a ton of purpose from it just because of how much I get to kind of help kind of move things both within the company and outside. So you've had this, in the time that you've been at Atlassian, there's been this truly exponential growth that's happened within the company. Let's talk about the culture and how the culture has changed or evolved with that type of growth. What's that look like? So it's been interesting because for us, as you imagine it with about 2000 people, you were able to know a lot of people. Like if you didn't know something, you likely knew someone who did know something. And so it was a much smaller, tighter knit community. And of course, as we've grown, we've had to figure out how we scale that. And I think the biggest thing, so I was actually talking to someone earlier about this today. The thing that has allowed us to scale very gracefully is the focus in on our core values as an organization. So we've got five values that we've, we've always held up as an organization. Uh, and those values have continued to be kind of the forefront in terms of how we make decisions. It's, it's allowed us to, you know, as we grew our engineering organization to like 4,000 people, we had to figure out, how do we think about how we work? How do we measure performance? And we really started looking to those values to help us do that. We also spent a lot of time, again, referencing back to those ways of working that we'd been establishing. One of the cool things is back in 2016, so before my time joining the company, we actually built out what we call our Atlassian Team Playbook. And this is a set of all the practices that we were following to help us work a very, you know, work effectively and efficiently as an organization. And we made it public and we've continued to add to it. And the cool thing is we continue to use that ourselves. And so as new, as I mentioned earlier, when new teams come on board, there's a number of plays from that playbook that we go and run with those teams or help them see how to run. And the cool thing is for us, our whole, our whole mission is to unleash potential of every team and tools are part of that practices are a big part. And so that's why we make things like our playbook free online. If you go to Atlassian.com slash team dash playbook, you'll actually find it. And I think there's over 60 of those practices there today with step-by-step guides. And this basically shows you how we work at Atlassian. And it's those sorts of things. And we've had to evolve those practices, of course. There's new plays that have come out based off of new experiments we ran internally to figure out how do we work when we're not 2,000 and we're 16,000? Because there's different ways of working and scaling there. but we've continued to add those practices to that playbook so that way others can hopefully learn from us at the same time. Yeah, and I might be making an assumption here, but it sounds like when I was a much smaller team, a lot of these norms, behaviors, they were kind of implicit. And what you really did is you took those and codified them into something concrete and tangible that is driving the decisions and behaviors. And when that happens, it can be easy to get bogged down for the organization is suddenly more complex. There's a lot more, I don't even want to use the word red tape, but kind of. But it seems from the outside looking in that that's not the case at Atlassian. That Atlassian has stayed energized, innovative, and constantly moving forward. Why do you think that is that you've been able to maintain that culture when so many other organizations aren't able to? I think it has to do with how we've approached maybe some core areas. And the big area that comes to mind is decision making. I think that's something that as organizations get larger, decisions tend to start to clump together at higher and higher parts of the organization. And so thus, you see these massive organizations, like, why does it take so long for us to get stuff done? And it's usually when you really pull things back, it's because you're waiting on decisions. You're sending them up, you're waiting for them to come down. And for us, was something we started when we were smaller. And it's something we're still really big into today is basically distributed decision-making. the best way to think about it is we like to use the analogy of a tree. We can kind of think of them as there's three different types of decisions. There's leaf-based decisions. These are small, low-impact decisions. These are decisions that anybody can make. we push code? And those are decisions that also a team determines what's a leaf. And they say, hey, maybe pushing code to production. is a leaf decision. Cool. Anyone can do that. You don't have to go ask for permission. You then have what we call branch decisions. Branch decisions are those that usually involve a team. But again, you're not going to be having to go beyond your team. Most decisions are considered either leaf or branch based decisions because we want to build our teams in a way that are both cross-functional, but also they have the autonomy to actually make changes. So if we've got a team that is working on a new set of features for Confluence, They have the authority to go out there and make those changes based off of essentially what they've kind of picked up in the guidelines we've established. And then we finally have this idea of trunk-based decisions and trunk-based decisions are those big sweeping decisions in an organization. And for us, we actually use a process. It's actually a play in our playbook called a DACI. It's similar to a RACI, but the whole idea of a DACI is that you have, what is it? Drivers, approvers, contributors, and informed is the acronym. And it's whenever we make a big decision, we try to be incredibly transparent about that. So if we're going to deprecate something or we're going to adopt a new policy that's going to impact the whole company, instead of going behind closed doors and be like, okay, we're going to bring the tablets out from on high and say, here you go. Here's the new policy or here's the change we made. What we do is we actually, outline what the change is. We give options and yes, there's going to be a decider that, or that, you know, that deciders going to be the person who is actually or driver. uh What was it? The approver. That's what it is. The approver is going to be the one who is ultimately making the call. But we open it up. So like for right now, I can go out into Confluence today and see what different Dacies are happening. And I can go on there. I can read about all of everything, all the different options they're considering. I can leave comments on them. But at the end of the day, it's that approver who will have the final authority. But it's just a fact of it being transparent that I think makes the biggest difference. Because one of the biggest things I see as I work with many organizations today is just a pure lack of transparency. And I think that more than ever today in the modern world of work, it's who kind of thinking about modern work is gonna be the crutch of most organizations when they wanna hoard information. Because with the advent of things like AI and other things, having, holding your cards too close, particularly even within your organization, is going to prevent you from moving fast, making better decisions, things like that. And so that's been a huge piece that's allowed us to kind of stay nimble because one, can, you know, we know we have intentional ways of how we make decisions, but two, we actually know what decisions are going on and thus we can react accordingly without having to wait for the proverbial tablets. Yeah, thank you. And so, you know, everything you're describing, these are these really powerful operational advantages that you have. And what that kind of makes me think of, especially since, right, these this playbook is available to the public online. And one of the, you know, classic tenets of strategy that I subscribe to is right. And operational advantages, not inherently a strategic advantage. Right. Anyone can go in. copy those operational advantages. Yeah, we're not doing anything special. Like, I'm gonna be honest, we're not doing anything special. So what is then the strategic advantage that keeps Atlassian right at the top? Hmm. think it has to, again, it almost goes back down to it kind of going circle again, back into the values and really that intention of being. like a people focused organization and outcomes driven organization. We're not focused in on that process. We're intentional with our process, but we put the right leaders in place. again, it's not a, we don't want it to be this command and control top down kind of mentality, but we, again, we, we autonomize our folks. We build alignment through our tools. So that's actually something that's actually helped us. And again, we drink our own champagne, as they say, we use our tools to actually give us. the ability to have that autonomy, but then provide information in a way that allows our leaders to make the best decisions because they can see across what's going on. And honestly, I still attribute this hugely to the fact that we're still a founder led organization. At 16,000 people, we still have Mike Cannon Brooks, who's helping steer the ship for us. And it's his enthusiasm and his drive for what he wants it last year to be that makes a huge difference. so I think it's a lot of those things combined that again, can I point to one thing says that's our strategic? Not really. I think there's a lot of little things that of course have manifested over the years and it's keeping an eye on things like the governance, because as much as you say with that operations, it's easy to do. It's so hard for people to do it if you're not intentional. And that's, know, I spent a lot of time working with organizations, trying to figure out how to get them operating more efficiently and effectively. And the biggest thing I find is it's really easy to set up a tool. It's really easy to set up a process. Follow through with that process is the hardest thing. And the thing is, if you don't establish cadence, you don't establish synchronization, you don't have the governance in place, it kind of falls apart. And thus we fall back into what we know and it all falls apart. So I think for us, We've established some of that good business rhythms to actually help us to actually be intentional with those practices, to make operations not a hard thing, it's just how we work. Yeah, thank you. And we've talked really about, you know, some of the strategic pieces and at the same time, this is a learning and development learning and growth podcast. And I am such a strategy nerd, so I will definitely get down that rabbit hole. So I want to circle back in or take us into the next part of the conversation. I'm curious, looking ahead, uh what do you think will define the next era of learning and development, specifically as it relates to team effectiveness and collaboration. think that the thing that comes to mind here, so as you bring that up, the that comes to mind is the innate curiosity of people. Because I think today, more than ever, we are in a point in time with learning and development where we have more options than we've ever had before. I think about things like AI. Again, I go back to AI because as much as everyone jokes around that, we hear AI all the time, it has fundamentally changed so many of these things. I could go to ChatGPT right now. it to build me a course on how to be a manager in a distributed work environment and it will build me something that I could technically send out to my organization. And so the ability to create content from an L &D perspective is now a moot point. It's something that it can just happen. And so it's unlocking some of that curiosity in people to actually be willing to dive in and learn something, not just from a, I've got to learn something. but I want to learn something. And I think that's where we'll have options now. It's making things like, ah you know, it's funny, one of the best trainings I ever did at Atlassian was a security training we did, which most people look at me and be like, what, a security training? And I always reminisce on this one because it was like this really fun interactive training they did that made me curious about where the story was going. was uh storytelling. within the training. so for me, I made it through not realizing that I'd spent 90 minutes going through this thing. And I think it's that curiosity that it unlocked that allowed me to do it. So it's that curiosity. It's the proper storytelling. I think if we can get good at those, the content itself is now easy to create. But now we have to think about how do we unlock curiosity? How do we tell better stories? How do we make sure, how do we engage people on the right content at the right time? And actually, and stop me if you want to jump in, but The thing that it makes me think about right now as we're talking through this is it's also using technology to know the right moment for like a learning opportunity. And that's where I think AI will be interesting because it will look at the situations. It looks what's happening around us, both individually from a day and day, as well as a team, other things. And now it could present to you being like, Hey, we recommend, this is the right time for you and your team to go through this training. Maybe you're a brand new team. maybe your team just went through a huge, maybe there was a huge issue that happened. And now all of sudden you get presented as a, hey, we should go through this development opportunity of building, of learning how do we build working agreements as a team? Because maybe we had a bunch of conflict in the ad, detected that and this is, hey, this might be a good opportunity for you. I think that's going to be another interesting thing as well. lots of, lots of opportunities, but it's that curiosity, that storytelling, and that really like, presenting the right thing at the right time, which I think will be interesting to see how that develops in L &D. And it's interesting, I'm thinking about the example you just used of a team that might have had some conflict that the AI detected. And say five or six years ago, would have been maybe that conflict was escalated and then the training mandate came down from HR, from another business unit, and it was remedial, right? It was punishing almost. group is like, we're fine. Why do we have to do this? Yeah, exactly. ah And so it's not even just that it makes it so much more personal. In some ways, removes the punishment or the remediation aspect of it that people can sometimes perceive. task anymore because it feels like it's appropriate at the time. And so it feels like it's the right thing for right now. Cause you're right. A lot of times to your point years ago when that happened, it might get escalated up and that issue, might still come down to just that team, but it's taken a couple of weeks for that to happen. And now the issue is blown over. Maybe we've just resettled in our own ways, but at the end of the day, it might be, uh it's now something else is more pressing to actually give to them. So again, it's about surfacing the right stuff at the right time too, because now I can be like, oh, this is a good moment. Like let's bring this up versus like, oh, here in a month, I'm going to go in and I'll send this to you. Yeah, and so one of my favorite instructor-led trainings to facilitate is actually a, it's a business writing course, right? It's not sexy, it's not exciting. It is to me, but, you know, often to people, it's not, yeah, oh, absolutely. And, you know, I do it in a lot of uh financial institutions, you most recently for a corporate finance division. And I always say uh to our contact at the company, hey, don't send us your people who need the most help. Send us your highest growth potential people. Because that's where it's going to make the biggest difference. And so I walk into the room. They all think that this is going to be like their high school grammar class or something. And an hour in, everything's totally changed. We're all on the same page. But it took months for us to get from this point of the organization identifying a need all the way to me being in the room. And then from there, me getting those participants on board. And so what we're talking about here is a way to just shorten that into a matter of days or even hours. Well, and I think that's where that it's that lead time that it takes to get to like in your example is what reduces the value of the learning into the point where it does feel like it to your point feels like it's remedial. It feels like it's just I have to do this versus this is an opportunity for me. And I think that's, I think that's neat. And you brought up something that made me think about like the fact that even as we think about just continuous development, know, you know, this idea. where now you've got the ability to start using AI to look at sentiment, but also things like, where are maybe your job prospects going? Maybe what are you struggling with? And it can actually bring up the right tailored learning based off of your style. I mean, imagine yourself having a curriculum that actually adjusts itself based off of the actual person taking it. Like if I'm taking a class and you're taking a class, We're both taking a security class or we're both taking a intro to project management class, but yours is tailored to your style and mine is tailored to my style. And now we both got the information, but it was being, it was able to be more impactful. And it's just because we couldn't do that before. It would just be the, the, the effort alone wouldn't be worth the squeeze. Now that's become less of an issue. Oh yeah, if I'm in front of a room of, you know, 16 people, I am constantly trying to align with 16 different learning styles for eight hours. That's exhausting. say with this because as a facilitator, a trainer myself for many years, I still do it now. We'll have to figure out what this looks like for us because there's a joy I get from that facilitation and that teaching. And so there's one thing of like, all right, the outcome is the learner. And like, I want the learner to have the best experience and I can give them that. But I'm like, how does my role evolve? And that's, and I don't, I'll be honest, I don't fully understand where we're going to go with those sorts of things. Uh, I think that's still, you know, something we've got to explore and experiment with, but you know, if I'm a learner, I would love to have the more focused experience, but maybe there are specific types of things that we still try to use together. And that might be things like team learning. Like to me, if I'm together as a team, although I might be have a different learning or I might learn a different way, having it. taught to me in the same way in a collective group versus almost in that isolation might be better. So that'll be an interesting one to see how that evolves. Yeah, I mean, uh I was talking with a learning and development firm recently who was saying that they're seeing a major uptick in demand for instructor-led training, specifically among the younger generations in the workforce who, you know, kind of entered the workforce during the pandemic. They're starved for this type of connection. So there's that piece. And then there's also this piece where one of the elements of, you know, my not-so-secret sauce when it comes to learning and development is the practice and the small group engagement that people get in that training room. know, in the programs that... Go ahead. I would say like in the instructor-led programs that I facilitate, about two-thirds of the time is spent actually in small groups practicing the skills that we're developing. And that's what... that's where you're at, right? That right there. It's the practicing. And that's the thing, there's a learning and then there's the practicing. And I think that's, I'm so glad you brought that up, because I think that is exactly it. It's facilitation becomes more of the, do I enable, how do I help create an environment where people can practice and I can be there to help support that in a group environment? Because again, I can practice with a bot, but. It's not the same. there's again, you want to find that balance. And so I think, oh, I love that aspect you bring up. That's perfect. Yeah, and you know, like you said, it's easy to get the content for a program. Throw it in chat, GPT, it's there. But that's what it comes down to is how do we create these spaces with this emerging technology and with ourselves to be able to produce a learning experience. And it's using it as a tool. And I think that's the biggest thing. A lot of people get afraid today. They're like, my gosh, is my job going to go away because of this? Well, if your job was to the point where it really was like everything you do could be done by chapter GBT. There's an opportunity for you to expand and think about, what is the human element of what I do? So I just build PowerPoints all day long. I like me. My job wasn't to do that. It was likely that's what it turned into over time. It's rediscovering. What it was I got hired for, what was the thing? If I was like a great example is business analysts. Business analysts, I've talked to a lot of those folks in those roles are like, what am I gonna do about my role? Like this is something easily. And I'm like, your goal was never as a business analyst to just be documenting all day long. Your goal was to discover. It was to be curious. It was to go uncover all these things and create connections. And it's almost allowing us. an opportunity for many of these roles to, to re-find what that intention was back in the day and then allow us to have the time to do that. Because yeah, when I had to do a BRD that was a hundred pages long back a long time ago, yeah, that took a long time and I didn't have the chance to do the discovery. Now that I've got something that whips that up in five minutes for me, based off of my findings, it becomes a, it becomes a, like the AI becomes a companion for me in that process. It's my It's my collaborator. And I think that's where, whether it be L and D or any other function, it's using, it's looking at it as that. And even for us at Atlassian, we have a tool called Rovo, which is our AI agent. That's very much how we use that internally is it becomes a companion as we're building out content and confluence. It's there almost like being our, I still think Microsoft has missed the boat by not introducing Clippy 2.0 with as AI. uh% agree. like our, it's sitting there and I'm like, Hey, I need help with this. like, I need an idea for this. it's interacting with me on the page. And those are things that if I look at it as a collaborator versus even a tool, even it becomes, it makes it much more of a dance versus a transaction. Yeah, and out of all of the AI tools and LLMs that are out there right now, with varying types and degrees of functionality, Microsoft is actually really onto something with the branding at least of its co-pilot. You know, I'll give them that the co pilot exactly. It's there to help you. It's not their takeover. It's there to help you Yeah, and those may not be the best on the market right now, but they've got a vision that I think is pretty admirable there. So I know you talk a lot about team shaping and what it looks like to collaborate in the modern workplace. What I'm curious about is how has your own leadership philosophy and own leadership practice evolved as you've done that work. Hmm. I think the biggest thing for me, and it's something I, it's easy to say now, but even back or back really when I started into the journey of teamwork and things like that, it was something where I always looked at leadership teams as, being different, to a different type of team, you know, it's, oh, but my realization is I've, as I continue to work with all sorts of types of teams and my philosophy is like every, everybody is part of an act. It's not a different type of team, it's a team. And with teams, there are core elements to any team. And so when I look at groups that fall into any form of dysfunction, almost 100 % of the time, it comes from the fact that if I look down the list and I says, okay, have you got intentional on how you want to work together? Have you got an explicit around who does what? Those are the things missing. And that's where I when I talk to leaders so often when I talk to leaders who are dealing with dysfunction. in their leadership teams is because they're not teams, they're groups of people. And they don't work as a team. Now they may not be a traditional team, but what team is in my opinion? I've worked with enough where I'm like, okay, a marketer's got a marketing team, a software team, a finance team, none of them do things the same way, but there's some core threads. And so my philosophy has really become that at the end of the day, teamwork is teamwork. And there are some core elements to what that is. And if we can get those right, honestly, we can unleash that next level in how we collaborate and actually be able to produce the results that we're striving for. So that's been the biggest thing for me. And so it's allowed me not to shy away from the fact that if I'm working with a leadership team, I might change my language a little bit, but the practices I employ when I work with them are no different than the ones I work with, a software team, a finance team, you name it. And it just goes back to show that again, a team is a team. I love that. That definitely mirrors my experience, right? That when there's dysfunction in a team, you can almost kind of go down a checklist. You have you done this? Do you do this? And nine times out of 10, they're missing those pieces. And they just need to kind of, yeah. So shifting gears a little bit, um you've built a... great and truly incredible public presence from what I've seen. know, from your LinkedIn, your website, know, keynotes, storytelling, lots of thought leadership. And you're very intentional about sharing your ideas very publicly. What role has that played for you as a leader in your career? What and how have you kind of thought about and approached this idea of building your public presence? So it's interesting when I really started focusing on what I would consider sharing, you know, that's really what it was. It sharing externally. You know, I did a lot of stuff internally and one of the stories I like to tell actually is, you know, I didn't even start public speaking truly until like 2017. And that was just because the universe kept throwing an opportunity in my lap. And I finally said, yes. Uh, and, it wasn't till those, like that moment when I first did that first talk or I first shared an article out there that I realized is like, wow, I can actually like, can provide some insights that I thought maybe might just be, you know, maybe, everyone knows this, but then I realized, maybe, maybe not everyone knows, or they haven't thought about it in that perspective. And so really over the last, you know, eight plus years, I've become really intentional about that. And I say intentional because especially in a role like mine, I can find myself building a brand and building a presence based off of purely Atlassian and you know, if, if, if probably our social team, if they're watching this, if they had their druthers, I would be posting a lot more about Atlassian on my, on my socials. But I'm really intentional about what I want to share because what I want to make sure I maintain that authentic brand because I love Atlassian, but it's also, I'm not, I'm not just a mouthpiece for Atlassian. I am here as an expert in teamwork and I want to help them, but like share with what they've done, but also help the world around. And so I've really been focusing on like, Again, when I share, trying to make things practical, make them experience-based, it's not just fluff. I don't wanna just throw fluff out there. Sometimes I'll share fluff, but it's fun fluff. It's me doing a rendition of a song based off of Trello or something like that. Those are the fun things I'll do. You should, you look up, or I did one, you'll have to look up the other one. What was that? uh I'll help you is a parody of I miss you by Blink 182. It was about Jira service management. ah So yes, those are my fluff pieces, but those are fun. And that's the other thing. I really focus in on the fun. Life's too short. I've got to enjoy what I'm doing. so I like to have fun with those sorts of things. I like to share the practical things. And I think that's what actually helps to build that presence out. Because if I'm just sharing to share, there's so many people that shares to share. And yes, there's There's bold statements, there's things like that. But if there's nothing backing that, if there's no tangible thing I can try, because so often today we're flooded with all these like, I want to be there. I want to get there kind of moments with people sharing. I want to focus on, how do you get there? Like, here's something you can do. Like we can, we can share a bunch of visions, but a vision is worthless without that first step. And so for me, I like to share that first step. And I think that's been something that's been big about my brand and why I like to stay practical. like to throw, know, theory is great. I like to say theory is great with a, you know, a bourbon in hand over, you know, by fire, you know, we can talk theory all day long, but, but practicality is the big thing. And so I try to share as much practical stuff as I can. that's beautiful and that's it's so funny that you kind of mention this piece around you and I'm probably butchering the way you said it but wonder like does anyone really want to listen to what I have to say do I know things that other people don't and that is it's it's such the plague of being an expert is that you don't even really realize that you are What was they say is that like the the true experts are the people that question their expertise like I think there's like there's some great graphs that show you know, you think you know everything but your your knowledge your thinking and your actual knowledge are inverse to each other. And as you learn more, you realize, oh, god, I don't know everything. But you actually do you become an expert. And now you're like, oh, and there's I just realized I went down the next leg of this rabbit hole and it goes a lot deeper and It's funny, even in my personal development when I was, uh, I started out in software and I did a lot of, uh, agile software development work, things like that. I remember early on I was, I, I'll be totally transparent. I was that hot shot scrum master guy. I know it all. And, uh, it, there's a couple very humbling moments in my, in my, uh, early career that still stick with me. And those are the moments that shaped me where I'm like, I don't know everything. Or I totally misunderstood this, you know, like there was a, I remember this one where I was trying to protect my developer from someone talking to him. And the, just the way someone looked at me being like, you know, that guy's a human too. He can make his own decisions. This is like, like second year out of school. And, uh, and I was like, my God, like you're right. Like, why am I, why am I hoarding him? Like a, like, like treating him trying to like, as a resource, like you can't talk to him. He's, he's being, he's trying to be effective. And I'm like, What is wrong with me? And it's those moments that helped to shape, you know, the fact that I'm like, I don't know everything. I could read it in a book, but what do they say? Knowledge is an understanding. And it's that constant trial that constant going growth that allows me to gain the understanding that I don't know everything. Yeah, and I've often said that, you know, those without imposter syndrome are likely to have a little bit of that imposter in. I know right exactly more likely to be a real imposter Yes, precisely. coming um up on the end here, I'm curious, what advice would you offer to emerging leaders who really want to challenge the status quo and lead change in how their teams work and make their teams more effective? I think the biggest piece of advice that I'll share, and this is B4EVERY leader, an L &D leader, a leader in finance, wherever you're at, is focus in on incremental steps. think this is the biggest thing I take from my time in software is that so often we look at change as these big initiatives and these big transformations. And you might even think of it as a transformation for your team. We're going from A to B and B is just... Differently state and the thing is is in as fast as the world that we're living in today is moving You can't simply do that because the moment you end up at B now you've got now C is now the new reality and so there's gonna be this Perpetual like my gosh, I'm always behind I'd say let go of the I'm always behind and focus in on what are the small incremental changes you can make within your team every day to evolve and this goes back Going back full circle to that playbook as we talked about it. The biggest thing I emphasize with teams is that let's say you're a new team and you're trying to get better and you know, you're like, all right, we got to do all this stuff. You don't have to do all this stuff. Do one thing, run one play as a team. takes an hour. And at the end of that play, you will be that much better as a team. And you know what? In a couple of weeks, maybe run another one. That's in just another hour and you'll be a little bit more. And if you can build that intentional cycle and it kind of goes back to that governance and things like that, like build the rhythm of getting a little bit better. You'll actually find yourself way better off and actually in the right direction compared to if you're trying to make these massive sweeping changes in your organization. So whether you're leading an L and D group or another, or just a small team, you know, if you're trying to make massive change happen, the cyst, you know, we're not made for that. And especially nowadays, you have to approach it in that evolutionary incremental way. So find your small changes, make small, precise changes, learn, and then do another one and then do another one. And that's the biggest thing I'll always share with leaders is like, as you're looking to evolve, just again, follow that incremental process. Absolutely, that is such a great piece of advice to end on. And for people who want to stay connected and follow your work, where's the best place to find you online? LinkedIn's a great place. So you find me at Mark Cruth on LinkedIn. You can also check, I've got links on my website, www.markcruth.com. That'll also bring you to those. So, and then you'll also just Google me you'll find me all over the place around didalassian. So uh happy to connect. And I always tell people, if you interacted with my content and you reach out and you're like, Hey, love that. I'd love to ask you about this or dive a little deeper. I'm a modern work coach. I am your coach. Feel free to reach out. I'm always happy to help. Thank you, and I will definitely throw those links in the show notes so can find them down there. Mark, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been such a great conversation. I know we've gone a little bit over time, but it's 100 % been worth it. Thank you. Thank you, Jacob. I truly appreciate it. And thank you all for watching. Thank you. And if you enjoyed this show, be sure to subscribe and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll also throw that link in the show notes. Thank you for listening and I'll see you next time on Catalysts.