Flipping the Barrel: Nick DeIuliis, CEO of CNX Resources

Well, Jamie and Martiel, thank you for the opportunity. I've had a chance to listen to a lot of the interviews that you guys have produced, and it's an awesome opportunity for me. I'm honored to be here. But yeah, I mean, we live in really interesting times, and we work in a really interesting, intriguing, vitally important industry. So you combine those two things together, it's going to be a target-rich environment, whether it's podcasts, books, running companies, that type of thing. So I think I've been sort of a beneficiary of those things that lead to those opportunities.

Well, that's a great couple of questions. I think going back to the first part of that, the sort of big moments or maybe influences growing up as a kid, I think they're sort of universal to a lot of kids growing up across different regions and areas of the country and frankly socioeconomic brackets. So one was the family unit. For me, I had the benefit of growing up with all four of my grandparents still alive and well for the bulk of my childhood, and they had a tremendous impact on me. Both parents worked, and grandparents spent a lot of time developing me and raising me. These were individuals who came from a generation that went through the Depression and World War II, so their mindset was very different than their kids'—my parents'—mindset. In many ways, I developed a lot of the characteristics of two generations ago because that's where I spent a lot of my time in my formative years. So it was a contributor in a big way to how I look at the world and maybe even how I go about strategically looking at things within the business world. So grandparents played a big role. Something also interesting was the timing. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh, and when I was a kid growing into my teen years, the region unfortunately was going through a substantial upheaval. There was economic carnage everywhere you looked in Western Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh. I remember you'd come home from school or come back from summer to get back into school, and a significant swap of the classroom—they weren't there anymore because their parents had to move out of the region to pursue economic opportunity due to job losses. My family was no different. My dad lost his job in the steel mills like thousands of others. So that had another big impact. Those were the biggies. Other things: school. I've always enjoyed school. I love to read, I like to study. I'm academically inclined, I guess. It was a way for me to demonstrate achievement, and it's a positive reinforcement loop. If you do well in something, it makes you more confident to pursue the next thing almost in a series. And I guess the other thing I'd throw in there is, this is another lost thing, but I was a paper delivery kid. Looking back, what a wonderful opportunity that was for thousands of kids to learn the basics of how to run a business. You had to deal with logistics, weather, customers, accounts receivables and payables when you collected. But we don't have them anymore, and I think that was a lost opportunity because it developed a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, innovators, and self-starters at a young age across America. I'd say those were the big ones.

Well, that's funny you link those two together because they're actually related. In Western Pennsylvania, everybody in some shape or form when I was growing up followed, were involved in, played sports. Now, I wasn't a great athlete, so it was quickly apparent to me that my professional track in professional sports or collegiate sports was going to be null and void, which led to an early realization: okay, if not that, then what? Going back to the love of reading and looking at school academics as a way to achieve and to compete—because like a lot of people, I'm competitive by nature and thrive in that world. When I started to progress through high school, no one in my family had ever gone to college, and nobody could inform me or mentor me as to what an engineer or a chemical engineer was or what they did. But I liked chemistry, I liked math. A guidance counselor at one point said, 'Well, if you like chemistry and math, did you ever think about chemical engineering?' I had just a basic understanding from the guidance counselor. One thing led to another. I wanted to stay within the region and had the opportunity to attend Penn State, and that's what led to my start in chemical engineering. Lo and behold, I went through four years at Penn State. I think it was the most difficult thing I've ever gone through or achieved, either academically or professionally. It was very challenging for me, but I graduated four years later and still really didn't have an idea of what a chemical engineer did. It wasn't until I took on an opportunity at the time it was Consol Energy, which became CNX Resources today—that was next week it'll be 34 years ago—that I got into that first shot at professional development. I went into a team of process engineers. The other four members of the team had more years practicing as an engineer than I was alive at the time. I was 21 years old, and they had 20-plus years of experience every single one of them. So I was just a sponge at that point, and it was a perfect relationship. I got into a situation where you had very experienced engineers within the team, and they had a level of expertise that was very high and a standard of excellence that was very deep. They were looking for someone like myself that didn't know much but was willing to roll up the sleeves and do some of the prep work and preliminary work to put them in a position to be their best. So I learned a lot, they taught me a lot. It was a mutually beneficial relationship and probably one of the best examples of mentoring I've ever seen.

It was my introduction to it. In fact, when I was thinking about where I wanted to work after I obtained the chemical engineering degree, all I knew at the time was two things: one, I wanted to stay if possible within Western Pennsylvania—that's a common trait with a lot of people in Appalachia, Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh. We all want to stay. Our parents are here, our siblings are here, our grandparents were here. We just have this innate, like birds homing back to true north, we're just trained to do that. And I also knew enough about chemical engineering to think that the chemical industry, like PPG or Alcoa within Western PA, would want to hire chemical engineers. As for energy, my understanding of the energy space wasn't even basic; it was non-existent. And lo and behold, fast forward to 2024, that remains to be the case for just about everybody coming up through the high school and collegiate ranks across the country today.

Yeah, you're right, and it actually links to your comment right before the question where you said that energy is so vital to society but so misunderstood, so wrongly maligned. It really starts with that because the reason that energy is so vital and also misunderstood goes back to all of us. As an energy industry, as a team that has developed what we've developed, and our predecessors before us and the next generation coming after, the three of us have done such a phenomenal job that people just take it for granted. It's magic that when you hit the switch, the lights come on. It's magic that when you want to take a drive from Houston to Dallas, you get in your car and you go. It's such an epic success that society has taken it for granted. It's almost run to the point where you don't have to worry about it. Well, that's also unfortunately created a legacy problem for us in this space and in the industry because when people took it for granted, that allowed a vacuum to be created where this fiction has been created about the energy industry and domestic energy and natural gas and oil and other forms of energy. And because we've done such a great job and because we've been complacent, this fiction has been constructed, and now policy is starting to follow the fiction. So into your question on leadership, how did I get to where I was? It was an evolution, and that evolution started out almost 180 degrees from where I am now. When I first started into the management ranks within my career, my approach was very much like most people, following the successes that got me to where I was. Going back to when I started out as a chemical engineer, I kept my head down, I worked very hard, I listened diligently, and I stuck to the task at hand. When I started to get into a little bit more of a leadership role, when the criticisms would come about the industry or about the region of Appalachia or about the company, I would take the approach of sticks and stones, ignore it, keep trudging ahead, do your job, the facts and the truth will rise to the top. Then I came to the realization thinking through it that there is a moral responsibility, there is an ethical duty as a leader, a fiduciary duty I would argue within a public company like CNX Resources for its leadership, including of course its CEO, to advocate on the facts, to advocate for the reality, and to be able to communicate and articulate to the whole range of stakeholders—owners, shareholders, employees, community, residents, policymakers, all of the above—but to advocate and articulate for what's actually occurring, what is the true, right scientific basis with what we're dealing with, what are the true impacts to society, what are the implications of good policy and bad policy. And if you're not doing that, I got to the point where through my evolution, I came to believe that I wasn't doing my job and I was failing in my fiduciary, my moral, and my ethical duty. That was the realization, but it also came with the realization that being a bit of an introvert and again wanting to keep my head down and rather have my nose in a book than online on the web, that was going to come with a price to pay. But again, that goes with the territory from my perspective. If you're not willing to pay that price, then the leadership opportunity or the leadership position in the energy space for a public company probably isn't for you. So I evolved into that. It took a number of years. I used to call the old way that I approach things 'political quietism.' That's a good descriptor. People say, 'How do you define political quietism?' I'm not sure, but I think I just described it. When you see it, it's one of much more being proactive on advocacy.

Well, the issue of career path—one option on the extreme is sticking it out with one company through all of its twists and turns for coming up on 34 years, versus another path of maybe challenging and running down opportunities with different entities across a career. Today, I think the reason why it's an even more magnified issue is that technology has changed. There used to be a level of stickiness when you went to a company. This was before the internet and before any communication platforms like LinkedIn. There was a level of stickiness where even if you were interested in pursuing another opportunity, there were challenges and hurdles to overcome to get your name out there and for those opportunities to find you. Today, it's almost instantaneous. There are so many tools and platforms built to accommodate that. So maybe that's one reason. The other reason is we live in a much more mobile society, so that also has been a contributor. The way we've dealt with this, and we are challenged with this and focus on this all the time at CNX, and I know all of our peer companies do as well, I think the secret to all this is communication. What I mean by that is communication beyond the forms and the check-the-box processes that a lot of companies go through with human capital and human resources, and instead just sitting down and having a conversation with an up-and-coming talented individual on the team and talking to them about what they are looking for in their career ladder—where their head is at, where they see themselves a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, from professional development skills to job responsibilities to where they want to live. Sometimes that might be life-related: do you see yourself having a family, do you see yourself moving around? And then superimpose that with where the company is going strategically and tactically, and where is the overlap? Inevitably, with great companies and talented individuals, there's going to be a lot more overlap than you might think. Then identifying that overlap, where that Venn diagram sits on top of each other, and developing a bona fide tailored plan for that individual and that company to mutually drive towards that overlap. If you don't have that conversation, and you still might be doing all kinds of other things like performance reviews and forms, then that's where the divergence starts to begin, and you see attrition and people leaving and pursuing other opportunities, maybe regretting those opportunities. But I think communication solves 90-plus percent of it, and it's certainly worked in my case personally. You asked about challenges through my career and different decision points. I came out as a chemical engineer, but I went back at night while working and got an MBA, and then I later went back at night while working and got a JD law degree. So that whole set of decision points—do I want to become a lawyer, do I want to stay as an engineer, do I want to get into management—became fast and furious for a young professional at the time. But what I had the benefit of was either management or mentors that were in a position and willing to invest the time to have honest-to-goodness conversations with me to talk about where we could have a career path or career ladder if I was interested in staying. They'd love to have me stay, and I was very interested in staying, and it worked out. So in some ways, I couldn't foresee some of the opportunities that were going to pop up down the road, but in other ways, because we were having those ongoing conversations, we were always ready to adapt and adjust accordingly, both company and individual. Now it's added up to 34 years. I try to find ways to institutionalize that within the DNA of the company and the wider team. It can be a challenge because that really comes down to one-on-one individual interaction, and everybody's different. But if you can capture that, I think you really come out with an optimized set of outcomes where you've got the individuals that want to stay and the company that wants to have them. You concentrate there, and you see some self-selection in the opposite direction where if it's not going to be a good fit down the road, the sooner we get on the same page as to how that evolution is going to proceed, the better off all will be.

Yeah, that's been a really interesting development to watch over the decades, especially not just in the energy industry but also in a field like chemical engineering. It's really interesting to watch unfold. I think there's good news here, and there's still—I won't say a challenge, I'll prefer to view it more as an opportunity. The good news is that the opportunity set, the wiring, the ability for talented female individuals in energy to progress and to see opportunity and advance in career, I think it is much, much better than it was 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. There are a lot of reasons for that, from what's going on in academia to what's going on in STEM. I think for years, STEM was set up in a way going back to grade school where it almost screened out a lot of female students just because of a lot of embedded issues. I think that has greatly improved. From an industry perspective, I see a lot of desire to create those opportunities and to find ways to get the best and brightest to rise to the top regardless of sex. The bad news or challenge, and the opportunity if you want to look at it that way—and I do choose to look at it that way—is I still see a huge barrier, and it's not just for female potential professionals in industry, whether it's energy or beyond, but basically all candidates when it comes to socioeconomic. I see a big barrier today when you look at zip code. If you give me the zip code, I can tell you whether or not there's going to be a barrier. I'm basically going to look at something like adjusted gross income of a household. So if you look at an area like the Pittsburgh region where I'm sitting right now, if I drive a half hour to the south down the interstate, I will show you the most rural of rural communities you can imagine. If I drive 20 minutes to the north, I will show you the most urban of urban in the United States. Here we're sort of in suburbia. I think this issue is well on its way to being solved at a better level when it comes to female representation in industries like ours, and it starts in K through 12. But urban, rural, underserved communities—we've got massive problems, and it goes way beyond just female representation and opportunities for female candidates entering the workforce. That's one of the catalysts that got us into some of our CNX Foundation efforts in the community, specifically with the Mentorship Academy. It's targeting those urban and rural communities. What I found to be the number one roadblock, the initial thing you run into, is just lack of network, lack of mentors, and a lack of understanding. In rural areas, the activity is right next door to them in some instances, but still no understanding and no knowledge of a network as to how they bust into that type of sector. Urban, again maybe a half hour, 40 minutes away, but no knowledge—might as well be on Mars as far as they're concerned. So if you can open the awareness to what something like the energy industry, the manufacturing industry, the building trades offer within your own region—you don't have to leave home to work in these endeavors—and you can target underserved rural and urban communities, those young adults that are sort of the juniors entering the senior level in high school, you'd be shocked at the pipeline of development that you can start to seed. The individual comes out of high school, starts into some sort of an apprenticeship program, either working in oil field services, working for an energy company, working in manufacturing, becoming a journeyman with the building trades. Then once they get on that, they go back like I did with night school to get an associate's degree while working, probably paid for by the employer. Then they go, if they choose, to get the four-year degree, and then they're off and running. Then they become the mentors and the network for people in their community that they know or that they see coming up as the next generation. So I think we know how that's going to work. But to me, you start thinking about a region like this one, even if the situation with diversity is looking better in the suburbs when it comes to professional development, you're still excluding probably 60 to 70% of the population base in this region when you include urban and rural. We've got a lot of work to do there.

Yeah, well, you're first off absolutely right. What was interesting for my experience in my earlier professional development—today we've got three values in the company that you'll find everywhere all over the walls here and we talk about them all the time: responsibility, ownership, and excellence. What they all together manifest in is a level of rigor, a level of expectation, a level of quality that is almost a standard that you never reach. You're always chasing it because as soon as you hit the first milestone that you were targeting, if you really are embracing ownership, responsibility, and excellence, you're going to set the bar even higher. So you're always in pursuit of a sort of abstract ideal. The reason I think a big reason why we've got those values defined as they are today is that if you go back into the history of the company—this company is over 160 years old. President Lincoln was in the White House when our company was incorporated way back in the day. But you go back to that history and going back to when I first started working within the culture, there was the Oakland Raiders 'Commitment to Excellence' type of approach here. The QA/QC that you went through, the rigor that you went through when you were trying to demonstrate something or test something in the field, when you were looking to publish something for consumption in the industry or in the space, when you were looking to put forth a work product internal to the management or to the wider team within the company, there was a maniacal focus on perfection. That superimposed itself into the culture of safety where the only acceptable standard is zero accidents perpetually, into environmental, and what they morphed into were those three values. Fast forward to today, it is within the DNA. It is not, I will say, for everyone. It's a little bit of a differentiated approach because it requires a sort of approach, attitude, and mindset that maybe you can adapt and learn some of it, but it also just has to sort of be to a certain extent in you. It has to drive you to a large extent. So we try to be very transparent, very clear about that from the get-go when interviewing a candidate. It could be somebody that's got 25 years of experience in the space, but we try to emphasize, 'This is a little bit different. Here's how it's different. What are your thoughts on that?' Certainly for someone new coming into the arena, failure is a big piece of that. If you're not, if you're pursuing excellence, you're not going to bat a thousand. If you're always killing it and you're never stumbling and you're never falling short of your goal, you're really not embracing excellence the way we define it. So the trick here is to lay out your priorities, rank them, go after the most important under the defined metrics, and then set them in a way where you might be lucky enough to hit those. But if we fall short, that's sort of by design. That goes with the territory. We adjust, we recalibrate, we go after it twice as hard the next day. So failure becomes a learned trait. The first time I stumbled, it was almost traumatic. But after you've gone through it a few times and you see the benefit of resetting and recalibrating and then getting up and trying again, and then you see some of the things that you've achieved that you never would have achieved if you didn't have at least the willingness to take on that level of risk where indeed you may fall short or you may fail. So I think that builds on itself. It becomes part of the cultural fabric of the company and the team, but it does require the ability to—I won't say embrace failure—but at least to expect it and be able to manage it both on the personal side as well as the team collective side.

Actually, I think those two questions are sort of one ties into the other because one impacts the other. I'm up early by nature. I don't need an alarm clock. I'm usually up around 5:15, 5:30. But my day is spent professionally in two buckets. One will be sort of as you would expect, the in-person interaction with respect to the job. That might be with the operations team, that might be in a meeting in a conference room, that might be doing whatever you would traditionally think of in a work environment. We are basically very much an in-person work team. We think it's tough to do what we do for a living and do it well completely remotely. So there's a big piece of that. And there's also a piece of what I'll call thinking, learning, content creation time. A lot of that of course deals within the energy space and with respect to the company, and that's where whether I'm doing that here during office hours or at home off hours, a big part of seven days a week. I don't know if it's 365 days a year, but it's probably 363 days a year I am investing in that effort because I like the first and I love the second. I would do the second for free. It's just who I am. I love doing that. That's how I break down the day. Now, what's interesting is that leads to a leadership style where I hear often there's the model of micromanaging, where a leader has their finger on every little detail and every little decision. There are benefits to that, and there are drawbacks. The famous example is Elon Musk sleeping on the factory floor when trying to get the line up and running. There's the other extreme that gets as much touting as the first one, which is how would I sum it up? My style is I pick the right leader and just make sure they got whatever tools they need, I let them go do their thing. That's sort of the hands-off approach, which there are a lot of successful models that embrace that. I'm neither. I'm somewhere in the middle. For our industry and for the type of company we've got and the culture and for my style, I'm sort of in the middle. So while I'm in thinking mode and learning mode and content mode, I'm consuming all the different things that are going on in the company, but I'm not tying down the team while doing that. I want to have situational awareness of what's going on, but I'm also not wanting to micromanage. But I think it would also be a dereliction of duty to say, 'Well, now I've got superstars on the team and you guys have all the resources you need, just call me when you need me.' That's not leading either. There's something to be said by leading within the team or from the front. So I try to take that balanced approach. There will be times when you surge towards one end and then shift toward the other end. That gets into work-life balance because if you take that approach and I've got a family life—I've got five kids, they're all basically adult kids now, the youngest are 20—but five kids and a spouse and a dog who barks from time to time, and all that stuff. That is another sort of third bucket that you have to balance with those other two. That can be challenging at times because we really live in an interesting and intriguing industry and profession, but that's the most important thing at the end of the day that sums up your life. I think that balance changes over time. I've seen it with a lot of colleagues. How the individual balances when they're in their 20s is different than how they balance when they're in their 40s, and it's going to be different again when they balance toward the end of their career in their early 60s. But being aware of it and going back and thinking through how I need to tweak this is probably a good approach. Because everybody's different, that's where you get into the ability to develop a culture where you have enough flexibility to let the individual manage that in a constructive way versus a free-for-all, but you also don't want it so rigid that you're losing a lot of talent that you wouldn't want to lose. That also plays into a lot of the diversity issues we were talking about earlier.

Well, we're coming out on the back end now. The youngest are 20, so now they're bona fide adults, and it's a different relationship. So the first piece of advice sort of coming through that for those that are either going through it or getting ready to go through it: it changes. What your role is going to be and what that balance is between profession and family is going to be different when your kids are infants and toddlers versus when they start school versus when they are teenagers versus when they are young adults. You need to evolve and adapt with that and recognize each situation for what it is. The second thing I'd say is do not miss it. If you miss that, you will absolutely have regrets. It has no bearing on what the individual kid ends up doing. It's something that you owe it to yourself to invest the time to be there. So to the extent that you can, you've got to make that happen. Looking back, it's one of the most challenging things that you'll do, but it's also one of the most rewarding things that you'll do. I've been lucky, but it does take a team effort. It's something where you've got to find what works for the individual family unit and for the individuals within the family.

Sure. The website is nickdeiuliis.com. Deiuliis is D-E-I-U-L-I-I-S, all one word. All the content from podcasts to commentaries, essays that I publish will be on there. We're always posting new material on it. There's something there for everybody—some sports stuff, some music stuff, some energy policy, politics, history. You'll find a lot of everything there. The podcast is 'The Far Middle,' and that's on the website if you want to see an archive set of episodes. It's on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, all that stuff. We publish weekly, and it's about 25 minutes an episode, and we cover the whole gamut. I think a lot of listeners, a lot of people in energy, would enjoy it. The book is 'Precipice: The Left's Campaign to Destroy America.' It's also available if you go to the website. You can see how to order a copy. I'd be happy to get you a copy. All the proceeds go to our Mentorship Academy. Those are the platforms. I'm on Twitter/X at NickDeiuliis. LinkedIn if you want to connect with me on that. If you just type in Nick Deiuliis, you'll be able to find me.

Thank you.