Author Archives: Rusty Rueff

About Rusty Rueff

Rusty Rueff, author of purposed worKING. Rusty Rueff is the former Chairman Emeritus of The GRAMMY Foundation in Los Angeles. He most recently completed the successful 16 month leadership role as Coordinating National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O) for the reelection of President Obama and ten-years of Board service and President of the Board of Trustees of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Corporately, most recently Rueff was the Chief Executive Officer at SNOCAP, Inc. until the acquisition of the company by imeem, Inc. in April 2008. Before joining SNOCAP in 2005, he was Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) from 1998 until 2005. He was also with the PepsiCo companies for more than ten years, with the Pratt & Whitney division of United Technologies for two years, and in commercial radio as an on-air personality for six years. Rusty holds an M.S. in counseling and a B.A. in radio and television from Purdue University. In 2003 he was named a distinguished Purdue alumnus, and he and his wife, Patti, are the named benefactors of Purdue’s Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts. He is a corporate director of Glassdoor.com and runcoach. He is the co-founder and Executive Committee Member of T4A.org, serves on the Founding Circle of The Centrist Project and a founding Board Member of The GRAMMY Music Education Coalition. He is also the co-author of the book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business. Rusty and his wife, Patti, reside in Hillsborough, CA and Charlestown, R.I.

day 3K256: The Watchouts – Whiners

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“Do everything without complaining and arguing…”

I’m a fan of Jim VandeHei because not only is he a CEO, but that he also shares his leadership challengers and lessons with others, from the perspective being in the CEO seat.  Lots of people, by the time they reach that ultimate position don’t want to be vulnerable enough to share what they don’t know.  The might be fine with sharing what they do know, but not the other way around. VandeHei does both and in my estimation, he does it well.  He recently wrote on his observation of five types of people in the workplace that I call “The Watchouts”.  This week we are going to dive into each and see if it doesn’t help us in how we conduct ourselves and how we work with others.

The first watchout is the “Whiner”.  The whiner is the person who is always pointing out what is wrong with their situation or others in comparison to themselves.  They will constantly point out that they are being treated unfairly or have been put at a disadvantage.  Every time they do this, they let the rest of us know what makes them insecure and they pass along to us their problems, which more often than we should we feel like we need to solve for them.  We can see a whiner coming and can almost predict what they will say next.  They are hard to change and sometimes we just have to put up with them, but it doesn’t mean we have to fall into their web and placate them or worse start whining ourselves.  It might be too uncomfortable to confront them, but at a minimum, it might be best to not join in and just walk away, hoping they get the hint.

We can’t truly bring glory to God in our work if we are whiners.  We are not to be complainers or ones who are prone to argue or point out the wrongs in others without first recognizing and improving ourselves (splinter vs board in our eyes, for example).  If we find ourselves wanting to whine about our situations, we need to stop for a moment and ask ourselves what is really going on inside of us?  When we are whining we have lost our spirit of gratefulness, humility and potentially our level of trust in God.  There will be plenty of opportunities today to “whine”.  Let’s do our best to not do it!

Reference: Philippians 2:14 (New Living Translation)