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 2336: Employment Flirting

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“They must be committed to the mystery of the faith now revealed and must live with a clear conscience.”

A friend was sharing a challenge he has with an employee who has been “Employment Flirting”.  He described a situation where a key employee has been in discussions with another organization for quite a while and before things went any further, the employee wanted to come clean and share that he’d been unfulfilled in his job for some time now but didn’t want to say anything and that this “flirting” had been ongoing, and that the employee was going to have another meeting and then decide whether or not he would move forward or not with the new employer. The employee thought he was doing my friend a favor by sharing this, versus surprising him with just a resignation.  And maybe the employee was right by trying to be a bit more transparent than most would expect, but my friend had a novel way of turning it around on the employee to explain how there are two sides to this coin and how my friend was now left without a lot of choices.  My friend asked back to the employee how he would feel had he, as his boss, come to him and told him that for the past few months he had been unhappy with the employee’s performance, but didn’t say anything but instead decided to go out and get to know some other people to see if they might be better at the job than the employee.  And in fact, he had found someone who he was going to meet with one more time, and if things went well, he’d be coming back to the employee and letting him know that he was being replaced.  As you can imagine, when put that way, the employee could see where “Employment Flirting” is indeed flawed, if, there is to be respect for each other. The lesson to learn here is that as we manage and develop our people, that our relationships with our employees is just like any life relationship and if we want them to stay intact and strong we have to work at them and be sure that we are being open, honest and communicative in both our satisfactions and discouragements before we start flirting around.

 

It’s kind of hard to wrap our minds around the emotion of disappointment that God must have felt when Adam and Eve broke the trust pact between themselves and God. Surely, as God, He knew it could (and would) happen, but He let them be flirted with nonetheless and they crossed the line, leaving each of us now marred and susceptible to our own failings. We each will have something in our lives that we are being flirted with that runs counter to the commitments that God has given us.  As in all of our lives, as it is with God, we will be better at keeping those commitments if we are being open, honest and communicative with Him and those around us who strengthen us in Christ. The question to ask ourselves today is what are we flirting with that we shouldn’t be and do we have our commitments in the right place?

Reference: 1 Timothy 3:9 (New Living Translation)