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 178: Delegating Up

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We do it all the time, even when we don’t know we are doing it. We delegate up with our bosses. “Oh no, I don’t do that. I would never do that”, you say. Oh, but yes you do. Here is how it happens. You and your boss are having a conversation, maybe it is your weekly one-on-one meeting to go over the tasks and updates for the week. Somewhere in the conversation you mention a problem or an obstacle that you might have run into to get something done. It could be a policy or procedure that has slowed you down or has stymied you from moving forward. It may be an approval that you need to get from another department. It might be that you have run out of funding for this part of the project and you need to figure out how to shift some money over from somewhere else. Or, it might be a problem you are having with someone else on the team, that you haven’t had the conversation with yet, or maybe you have had a conversation but nothing got resolved. It could be any of these topics or many more that you are discussing with your boss and she/he says, “You don’t worry about that, I’ll take care of it.” Or, he/she just picks up their pen and makes a note to themselves to follow-up on the item. Either one of those happens and you just delegated up. You let the boss take the ball and run for you. I make this sound like it is a bad thing. It isn’t at all and if it was, it wouldn’t happen nearly as much as it does. In fact, it is just a part of how work works. However, we do this without much thought but we find ourselves not wanting to delegate up our problems to God even though it is clearly said that we should. We read; “Give all your worries and cares to God, for He cares about you.” But, still we hold onto our own problems tightly and won’t give them up to God to help us out and through our rough times and challenges. Our bosses may reluctantly take the problem but we don’t have a problem in handing it off to her/him. And yet God, who doesn’t flinch, but instead welcomes the problems and wants to take them from us, we resist and think of last in the chain of support. Today, we all may want to rethink who we are delegating and reorder our delegation chain and start first with delegating up to the highest order first and then working down from there. By the time it gets back down to you, it may already be taken care of for you.

Reference: 1 Peter 5:7 (New Living Testament)