90 Billion Reasons You Should Start an Energy Leadership ‘Shop Class’
Mike Rowe proposed that "somebody somewhere carves out just a little sliver" from $90B of announced investments "and allocates it for better storytelling" so that kids, parents, and guidance counselors can SEE the prosperity that flows from learning and using in-demand skills.
While the insights and solutions Mike shared during the July 2025 Energy & Innovation Summit were focused on BIG PICTURE, WIDE-RANGING workforce challenges, his comments equally apply to leaders like you who unwittingly miss opportunities to carve out "just a little sliver" of time to better showcase the work you and your team do and, in turn, significantly boost engagement and understanding among your INTERNAL stakeholders.
As discussed in Episode 116 of The Energy Detox (appropriately recorded amidst the noise of hard-working construction workers performing "dirty jobs" outside of PPG Paints Arena), the reason that you—and many of the leaders who took part in the CMU summit—miss those opportunities is because you're busy taking the ACTIONS and busy generating RESULTS that are expected of you.
However, sometimes actions do NOT speak louder than words; and sometimes results do NOT speak for themselves.
So, take a moment to ask yourself:
"How can I use the idea of a 'shop class' to more effectively expose internal stakeholders to the work that my team and I do?"
RELATED CONTENT
What Wild Things Can You Do to Build a Dominant Energy Team?
Find out in Episode 109 of The Energy Detox, which uses local, statewide, national, and global headlines connected to Washington County's Natural Gas industry to help you answer the following questions:
1 - How can you use the recent renaming of Wild Things Park to EQT Park as an excuse to consider what you want people to think of when they see or hear YOUR name?
2 - On the heels of last year's Cecil Township setback ordinance (and de facto ban on future natural gas development) and an ongoing push to impose a statewide setback rule (frac ban), what better time than now to ask how often you're unwittingly fueling harmful ideas that might SEEM benign at the surface?
3 - How does the April 2025 visit to Washington County by Doug Burgum, Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, and the comments he shared alongside leaders of Range Resources, EQT Corporation, Halliburton, and AXPC inspire you to not merely strive to lead a "winning" team, but instead to set your targets on a far more inspiring goal of achieving world-renowned, best-in-class, DOMINANT results?
4 - And speaking of results, how does the announced formation of Energy Corps by Scott Tinker and Toby Rice—who reminded attendees during Sec. Burgum's visit that the development of the world-renowned and globally impactful Marcellus Shale began in Washington County 20 years ago—challenge you to focus on metrics that actually matter (like lifting every human in the world up to 50 MWh and $50,000 per year in 50 years) and metrics that can lead to some truly wild things (like eradicating energy poverty and saving the lives of 3+ million people who die each year from indoor air pollution) instead of wasting time, energy, and money chasing fluffy, intangible metrics with minimal impact on your stakeholders?
How can you be seen as a differentiated commodity?
Transcript
(AI training in progress; please excuse any errors)
Hello and welcome to The Energy Detox coming to you today from outside the EQT gate at PPG Paints Arena, a couple miles away from the big Energy and Innovation Summit that occurred yesterday on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. And during that summit, there was a whole list of all stars or heavy hitters, or whatever analogy you want to use to last night's MLB All Star game who talked. There's a lot of panels or hours of talking, all of which is publicly available for you to watch or listen to, if you're so inclined. But throughout all of that talking, there's one speaker, there's one set of insights that stood out to me, and that speaker was Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, a show that has been on air for 22 years.
00:47
And Mike Rowe was addressing something critical to the macro conversation, that is, if companies are going to invest 90 plus billion dollars into the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, well, they're going to need people. They're going to need workers to actually put that money to use. You're actually going to need people employed doing the things that need to get done, especially as it relates to the trades, construction and electrical workers, anything that's involved in manufacturing and the putting up of new buildings and infrastructure that is going to fuel the future here in Pennsylvania and, in turn, throughout the United States. But Mike's comments, in my mind, at least we're not limited to again, that macro. He wasn't thus there my mind, addressing the big needs of these companies, the big needs of our nation. To me, he was touching on something that a lot of leaders that I work with fail to do, and that is to showcase exactly what it is that they accomplish. Because there's so many leaders, you may very well be one of them who is unwittingly resting on your laurels, but unwittingly allowing the results to speak for themselves, when in many cases they don't. There's many leaders, again, including yourself, who are missing out on opportunities to better showcase, to better storytelling, and that was the point of Mike yesterday. He said, we need to do a better job of storytelling. We need to do a better job of showing what it is these jobs entail. And we'll get into more details exactly about what Mike said.
02:18
But for those of you who've already had enough of this episode. I least want to leave you with that question, which is, what opportunities do you have to better showcase, to better tell your story? To not stop when these nice, pretty, sexy results, if you will, are shared with your stakeholders, we're in the midst of Q2 earnings season, when companies are pulling together all of their results to show to investors and anybody else that, hey, you know what? We're not just a bunch of words. We're not just a bunch of empty promises. You know, here are the actions that we take, and here are the results that we're taking. And that's good, but what I'm saying today is that it's not enough. It's not enough to say, hey, you know, actions speak louder than words. And, you know, here are the results that we've generated. Sometimes you actually need to showcase those results show how the sausage is made, if you will, to a greater extent than you currently are. And while this certainly applies to current and future labor and showcasing, again, what welders do, what electricians do, what the construction workers who I'm surrounded by here, your PPG paints arena are doing right now, it's equally important for you, especially if you're in a white collar role, to also showcase how you actually achieve those results, to shed some light into what it is you do on a day to day basis, so that your audience doesn't just hear what you have to say and then dismiss those results and kind of move on to the next thing without actually finding opportunities to better connect, to better engage with you and your team. It's a huge mess that, again, I see all the time, and it's one that over the next couple of minutes, I want to offer some tools, some practical approaches that I deployed with leaders like you to overcome this lack of showcasing, this lack of storytelling, if you will, that is so critical for leaders to actually sustain the momentum that they may very well be building.
04:04
So that being said, let's go back to what exactly Mike Rowe said yesterday. And here's his quote, word for word. He said, what I would propose, with all humility, is that somebody somewhere carves out just a little sliver out of that, and by that he means the $90 billion in investments that were announced yesterday a fraction of a percent and allocates it for better storytelling. Our country needs a national resource. Pennsylvania can lead this charge where any parent, any guidance counselor, any kid who is curious enough to explore the opportunities we are talking about can go to a destination and see people who look like them and talk like them and remind them of them prospering as a result of mastering a skill that's in demand. He continues. If we just dismiss that as PR, then we're just going to keep pushing the same rock up the same hill and now and listen to. Talking to Mike talk again, not in person. I was not there in person at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday, but in hearing that, and then having the luxury of going back and re listening to it, I obviously understood what he was talking about from a workforce standpoint. And that's not an uncommon theme here in western Pennsylvania and around the country. That is the lack of workers, lack of current workers, and certainly the lack of future labor that will be required to again, put all of those billions of dollars to good use.
05:26
But I didn't just hear him talking about the macro. What I heard was, hey, there's opportunities internally for companies to actually showcase what individual workers are doing to other workers, to actually share what it is they're doing on a day to day basis. And you know some of that you might think of as you know lunch and learns and the you know, the occasional presentation. And sure, there's a piece of that. But more importantly, what are you doing? And how are you missing out on small opportunities to grab somebody by the hand and say, Hey, are you curious about what I do, taking your computer screen, if you're in an office setting, and turning it around and saying, Hey, look, this is what I'm looking at today. Looking at today. Have you seen this before, engaging again with other departments in a way that you've never done before, that's not scripted, to actually show them, not just tell them, but show them what it is you do. Yeah, this is cliche, something that's talked about all the time, but it's so often missed. Why? Because individual leaders like you, individual teams like the one that you might be a part of, are so busy generating results and taking action, which is a good thing, that they miss the opportunity to again, take that small sliver of resources, which might not be money, in your case, it might just be time, but that small sliver of resources that Mike Rowe is talking about and invest that into better storytelling and showcasing.
06:46
So again, the question for you today is, what can you do to enhance the visibility to what it is that you and your team do internally, not just in the macro, because on the macro, you know what I would imagine, there was a lot of industry leaders there yesterday who heard Mike Rowe talk and immediately said to themselves, at least internally, oh, we're doing that already. We are showcasing what we're doing. We're taking people from the community, we're taking high schoolers, we're showing them what we do. And it's true, right? There's all kinds of rig tours, there's all kinds of intern type programs. There's great program that CNX runs called the mentorship Academy, where, again, they embed high school students into real jobs, not just energy jobs, but real vocal, hard working, good paying, sustainable jobs. And they're doing a lot of what Mike Rowe is talking about, which is again why I quickly pivoted to what is being missed inside of companies to showcase what individual departments do, to build those strengths, to break down silos, if you will. Because again, it's easy, it's free. Just takes a little bit of time. But the fruit that is born in terms of the sustained momentum, the sustained engagement of company, is mind bogglingly high, if you will, from an ROI standpoint.
08:05
So again, same question I've asked a couple times already, what can you do to enhance those connections with those around you, so that you're not unwittingly hiding the real work that you do? What can you do to showcase, literally show, not just tell, but show and tell what it is you do. And perhaps the best analogy for that is again, going back to Mike Rowe, the high school shop class. Mike spent a couple moments lamenting the loss of high school shop classes, not just for those individuals who might be inclined to enter a shop class and work with their hands and discover some things that they enjoy doing. But just as much for those who aren't going to go into work that maybe involves their hands and not go into trades and carpentry and construction and things of that nature, Mike said no.
08:54
When you take shop classes out of high schools, you also miss those opportunities for osmosis, if you will, for people who are just walking down the hall to peek into a shop class and kind of see what's going on, so that they can form a better sense, a better awareness, of what it is people do again, not just kind of hear these descriptions of these jobs and what they do and then dismiss them of something that's not applicable. Mike laments lost his shop classes because it was what a showcase. And I know I've said that word a couple different times, showcase, in part because it's fresh in my brain from an off site, a two day off site for a leadership team that I helped facilitate, and obviously in the off site, you know, the team talked about the actions that they can take as a result of getting together and talking and outlining different elements of feedback from their teams, much as what occurred yesterday at that summit. Right? You could talk and talk and talk, but this leadership team recognized the importance of taking action. But in that conversation where they also found themselves, was talking about the importance of showcasing those actions. Demo. Demonstrating those actions, not just generating results, perhaps bottom line results, in terms of financial results and engagement results and lower turnover results and all of the different things that companies might tout, but actually having real one on one conversations again, grabbing somebody by the hand and walking with them and talking about what it is they discussed behind closed doors at this off site, that's the real way to build engagement, to not just stop at saying, Hey, we took action. Here were the actions and go forth. Shed some light into the thinking. Shed some light into what's on your mind as an individual leader, so that you're controlling that narrative, so that you're telling the story, and so that you're not relying on your stakeholders to come up with their own story, with their own narrative that may not be complete. Might not be wrong, but it may not be complete, and that's the point. Today, if you've already made a $90 billion commitment to something, much as all of those companies yesterday made $90 billion in commitments to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, why not do as Mike Rowe said, and take a tiny sliver of money, tiny sliver of resources, to make sure that the momentum that was discussed yesterday is sustained.
11:08
Why not take that same idea apply to your own life, to your own leadership, build upon, again, the huge investment that you've made to this point in your career, and take that tiny sliver of time and energy and say, Hey, how could I tell a slightly better story. How could I showcase a little bit more what it is I do, and as I move to conclusion here and again, tying together this whole idea of jobs and people who are looking for new careers or maybe pivoting in their own career, I'd be remiss not to bring in one more example from the work that I do as a coach, especially when it relates to career coaching, because so often I encounter individuals who already have this nice, beautiful resume, or maybe they've outsourced the resume writing, and somebody's currently writing this resume, and you know, it all comes back to them doing the right things that is, putting in the results right, putting in big eye popping numbers, like the $90 billion number that was touted yesterday. And that's great. Clearly, I would suggest that you actually have real numbers, real results, real proof, demonstrated proof of your actions on your resume. But it's amazing how many individuals in career transition, they fall short of telling that story. They fall short of actually showcasing why those numbers matter. Just as Mike Rowe said yesterday, we can do all of this, and this is good, and we can create those jobs. And, you know, we can have trade schools and and funnel people through these, but if you're not telling a good story, if you're not connecting it to people's individual bottom lines, you're going to fall short.
12:34
And that's true in career coaching, and it's true again, if you are a leader within an organization, if you can't connect those results, if you can't connect those investments, if you can't connect the financial metrics that, again, your company might be talking about as Q2 closes here, and numbers are released if you can't connect those to the individuals. And tell a story of why it matters. Tell a story of why success or lack of success matters for an individual contributor within your company. Well, you failed. Even if you achieving great success, great results, you are not in a sustainable position. And I say that as somebody who is on a mission, if you will, to help fuel sustainable leaders, not just leaders who achieve results, not just leaders who can pat themselves on the back after a long career, because of everything that, again, can flow into a resume or a bio, but it's leaders who are actually building those engagements, those connections, those channels with the future, like the future workforce here in western Pennsylvania and in turn, America, who are truly sustainable leaders.
13:39
If you want to be a sustainable leader, ask yourself again today, how can you build stronger connections with the people right in front of you? How can you take the results that are right in front of you and translate that into actions that showcase what it is you do, why it is you do what you do, and why it matters to your stakeholders? So with that, thank you, as always for tuning in here to The Energy Detox and until next time, take care and have a great rest of the day.