The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or client — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

Connecting with customers is a challenge. It has to start with finding shared goals and a shared language. In this episode, guest Bob Rowe from Northwestern Energy shares his approach to creating common ground with your audience—so you can build trust, improve relationships, and reinforce reputation.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Michael Maslansky:

They said what? Welcome to HearSay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today, and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is, “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear,” and that’s why we call this HearSay. I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky and Partners, and author of the Language of Trust.

Lee Carter:

And I’m Lee Carter, partner and president at maslansky + partners and author of a book called Persuasion. We’re joined today by two of our fabulous colleagues, Ben Feller and Will Howard. Thanks for joining us.

Ben Feller:

Hey, Lee. Hey, Michael. It’s great to be back.

Will Howard:

Hello, all.

Michael Maslansky:

Hey, Ben.

Will Howard:

Thanks for having me.

Michael Maslansky:

Hey, Will. Good to have you both here. Will, I think you’re gonna like this one. It’s got a little Montana action.

Will Howard:

Oh, newly relevant. Post-move for me. Can’t wait.

Michael Maslansky:

Exactly, exactly. All right, so I think we’ve got a really interesting topic here. As we’re starting to do this season, we’re bringing in a guest. And I have invited a great guest, someone who I’ve done a lot of work with and have a tremendous amount of respect for. His name is Bob Rowe. He is the recent former CEO of NorthWestern Energy. He just retired at the end of last year. NorthWestern Energy is an electric and gas company. It serves about 750,000 customers across Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Yellowstone National Park, and we’re gonna talk about the theme of what we’re calling common ground, of the importance of using communication to achieve common ground and ultimately, help you deliver, your business objectives, whether it’s with customers, employees or other stakeholders. And one of the things that are really incredible about Bob and his perspective is not only that he served as CEO of a public company for 14 years, which I think is unbelievable, but also that he used to be a regulator. He was on the Montana Public Service Commission for more than 10 years. He was also the president of an organization called the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, or NARUC, which is the regulator for these local electric companies. So he’s seen the industry from several different perspectives and I think it gives him a really valuable insight about what customers want, what regulators want, what different stakeholders want, and how to give them what they want effectively through your communication. So I had the opportunity to talk to Bob before the taping of this episode and so we’re gonna go to segments of the interview, and then we’re gonna come back and talk about some key takeaways from our conversation. And so let’s go to the tape.

Michael Maslansky:

 Bob (laughs) welcome to Hearsay.

Bob Rowe:

Well it is delightful to be here Michael, I always learn so much from you, I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Michael Maslansky:

Well thank you, but first I want to learn from you or take an opportunity to be a little bit jealous, which is, I mentioned you’re an avid skier, I recently asked you, about helicopter skiing. ‘Cause you had mentioned it, it’s on my bucket list, but I have not done it yet.  but it seems like you have the opportunity to live,  a life that is kind of full of outdoor activities in Montana. what’s your favorite part of living in that part of the country?

Bob Rowe:

What I would say about  Montana in particular, but our entire service area, is one of the things I love, is the stewardship opportunities that come with working for Northwestern Energies. So in Montana, we have the run of the river hydro system.  we have biologists,   avian experts, fish experts conservation experts. And it’s just a real privilege to be part of all of that. So just driving around our service territory and any of the states are- or particularly as you mentioned, in Yellowstone National Park and to think that our people are a part of that is just absolutely stunning.

Michael Maslansky:

Great. So, you’ve recently retired from the CEO role, which you’ve been in for 14 years, which is an unbelievable achievement at any company, and certainly at a company in an industry, , like energy which, , we’re gonna talk a lot about. But before we get into the specifics of communication and things like that, I’m really interested. You know, if you think back to 2008 when you started in this role and then, , think about, where you are today, what do you think is the biggest difference, , in terms of how people look at the industry and in terms of the challenges of, of being a CEO who wants to communicate with different groups of stakeholders?

Bob Rowe:

I’m going to start by saying what hasn’t changed.  and what hasn’t changed is that customers,  still want, affordability.  they want reliability,  and they want to,  be able to feel they know that the people who are providing them service, the people who are working with them. So that’s a constant that said, we have absolutely been on, probably not just one but multiple journeys, over those years in terms of deploying technology, investing in, basic infrastructure, trying to understand, what our customers expect of us. And to get closer and closer to our customers. So priority over the last 14 years has been to engage with customers, engage with communities. And I know that one of Brian’s top priorities is going to be continuing to improve the customer experience and to do that with shoe leather and with technology. One of the things that we did early in my tenure and this is pretty old-fashioned actually, was to re-open all of the offices in Montana to walk-in customers. Montana power company, our predecessor, had like so many others gone entirely to an over-the-phone or ultimately online customer experience. And it was a revelation to me to get to know our South Dakota and Nebraska operations, where customers still walked into offices. So, recreating the first-person experience and then freshening all of our offices so they’re actually really nice places for a customer to walk into was really important. And interestingly we were able to do that because the technology allowed the person behind the desk in a small office in for example Mitchell South Dakota, or Great Falls, Montana to have exactly the same information as someone sitting at a centralized call center.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, I think that’s so important, that, you know again whatever the legal structure is, you and the industry really have decided to, behave like a customer-focused industry and organization. So presumably it’s more expensive to do that, right? To create that channel, tell me about the decision-making process to go and make that investment.

Bob Rowe:

Yeah, we’re able to achieve efficiencies elsewhere and made the decision quite some time ago obviously to use part of those savings to invest in the local experience the direct customer experience. I’ll actually give you a quick story here one of the South Dakota commissioners just a few months ago was going to pay a visit to one of our local offices she walked into the office unannounced. The manager knew that she was coming, but the folks at the front desk didn’t.  , before she even got through the door she was greeted with, “We’re so glad to see you. How can we help you?” They had no idea, who it was they were trying to help. So the commissioner was, first of all, delighted that they weren’t expecting her. Loved the customer experience and that was to me just a reminder, first of all, how fantastic our people are. And how great it can be to provide that kind of an experience for, anyone. In another one of our offices, a customer brought in cookies on a Friday afternoon with a note for the customer service team. You make paying our bill fun. Not every day is fun, but when you can have that kind of engagement with your customers that’s fantastic. And those are little examples, bigger examples of course are situations where you have the opportunity to partner with, maybe it’s a nonprofit. Maybe it’s a business that’s relocating or growing. Maybe it’s a local government on a project that really, really does move the needle. And we can’t resolve every challenge and we can’t make everyone happy. We can be as direct and respectful as possible and try to understand, other points of view. First just on the customer experience, one of the things that we do is, ask our folks, ask ourselves who’s responsible? Who owns the customer’s experience? And the answer is, we all do. I don’t care whether you’re an executive or an engineer or a line worker or a gas technician or a customer service representative. We all do and we can all contribute. And the opportunities to recognize that are absolutely critical.

Michael Maslansky:

All right. So, we’re gonna jump in on Bob here and just dig a little deeper into the first part of this interview on building a great customer experience. And I think pretty easy to see just what kind of guy Bob is really down to earth, incredibly humble, really a people person, and fabulous to talk to and work with.

Lee Carter:

You know, I think it was so clear that he’s one of those very, very charming leaders. But what I loved is right off the bat, instead of trying to talk about what he was trying to accomplish or what he achieved, he was talking about what people wanted. He’s putting himself in the customer’s shoes every step of the way. When he talks about there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, affordability. When he talks about the experience of opening up those call centers. Everything is from the perspective of who he’s trying to talk to, not himself and I think that makes him extra compelling.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. I mean, I think that point about going to customers, particularly for an industry that because of the way that they’re set up people don’t think that they have a need to go directly to the customer and really focus on them is even more powerful.

Ben Feller:

I mean, I think I echo Lee’s points about Bob’s focus on steering everything straight to customers and constantly getting closer and closer to them stood out to me for a couple of reasons. Even when you asked him, Michael, about the fate of the industry and investments, he brought it back to customers and people. And I think there’s a real lesson there for a lot of the leaders of companies and organizations who listen to this podcast. They tend to go towards, if you go big picture, they talk about data and innovation and trends and technicalities, and they think very macro. And even in that sense, Bob thought, “No. It’s about the customers. It’s about the people.” And then, he went further by saying, “Who owns the customer experience?” I think that’s such a really important point and so resonant because in large organizations, people tend to think by title. That’s not my job to do customer relations. We’ve got somebody for that. We’ve got a department for that. When in reality, if you think about it, as Lee said, the customer, everybody at that company or that organization is an ambassador. Anybody who you come in contact with can profoundly shape what you think of a company. And I think he really gets that. – it seems like the longer he was in the (laughs) job, the more he loved it and embraced it.

Will Howard:

Yeah. As someone who just recently moved from New York to Montana, I can attest that it’s a little bit of a different world out here. So for me, it’s always a really interesting exercise to find someone who is a compelling communicator in a particular context. So he’s a naturally charismatic gentleman working in a market with a kind of small-town energy to the communities that they serve, no energy pun intended genuinely. And try to unpack what specifically they do in their context. They’re actually generalizable principles that can be applied elsewhere to whatever kind of work you’re doing and whatever kind of audience you’re working in. I think, Ben, what you’re talking about is some of the strategies or some of the decisions that he’s making and the way he approaches problems that anyone can learn from.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. I think, we put this whole episode under the theme of common ground partly because of what he said here, how important it clearly is to him to kind of stand in the shoes of his customers, to share, the world from their vantage point, same thing with his employees, and create a common experience, because when we do that the communication naturally flows from that kind of common sense of experience. It’s going to be perceived more credibly. it certainly will be more personal. , and for both those reasons, it’s going to be more effective, you know, even if you’re at the place that you go into to pay your bill.

Lee Carter:

You know, I thought, it was fascinating when you asked the question of him, opening the doors. That had to be a costly, decision. And he didn’t even seem to flinch at that. It was very much about that was the right thing to do. We could find trade offs in other places. But to me, there’s something very compelling about him having opened the doors, and it’s not just from an operational standpoint. It’s from a communication standpoint. It’s a symbolic gesture, I think, of the kind of culture that they’re trying to convey and trying to be. If they had closed doors, it wouldn’t be the same kind of environment. It wouldn’t be the same culture. And often, when we talk to our clients, we talk about this idea of signals and symbols a lot, of what are the actions, the concrete things you can do to signal to your customers or symbol a real change? , and I think he did that just naturally by what he was doing.

Will Howard:

A favorite quote of mine that’s much, as you can imagine, much longer and more verbose, because it’s from David Foster Wallace, but that I often think about in the context of the work that we do is essentially, to paraphrase, that every time you say something, you’re communicating two things. You’re communicating the semantic content. You’re communicating the actual information that you’re trying to get across. And you’re also communicating something about yourself. And what you’re communicating about yourself comes through in all the little decisions you make about how you choose to frame up and articulate your point, because there are so many options every time you have an interaction for how you want to approach it and how you want to articulate your point. And I think in the context of communications like Bob is talking about, it’s really important to note that not thinking about it, not making a choice, or taking an easy or a default approach, is actually still making a choice. It’s showing up for whatever audience it is in a default fashion and, and missing an opportunity. There’s really no such thing, as neutral. Every interaction is going to matter. There are some favorite examples that I love to cite when you think about this idea of maximizing and creating the experience at every touchpoint. Chipotle used to have little gift cards and on the back where usually you would have the long legal disclaimer, they had a fake, very friendly fine print that was about nothing in particular. Right? Or Slack, the productivity software we use around the office whenever you get an error, it takes you to a really trippy looking goofy outside-of-space and time-looking screen that says, “Wow. Something weird happened.” And it’s a little moment of levity. Those are choices in moments where other people would’ve taken the default route, where they’ve chosen to reinforce the fact that they’re paying attention and the fact that they have a particular personality they’re trying to communicate.

Ben Feller:

Such an important point, Will. When you talk about the little decisions that Bob makes, they add up to something big, because they add up to a mindset. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the offices that he oversees, when somebody comes in there, the reaction people get, it’s, it’s not in a playbook. It’s just the culture of the place because the little decisions mean a lot. And I was thinking as you were talking about how often we as customers are calling for help. And before the company even tries to fix our problem, how often do they say, “Can you hang on after this for a survey?” (laughs) Right? So they’re asking something of us before we’ve even gotten any help. Right? First, we have to get clear to find a person, and then they want our help to evaluate that person. What he’s talking about is something totally different. How easy can we make this for you? Right? It’s the little, little things that change your customer experience.

Michael Maslansky:

So you kind of start with creating a common experience for customers and then, his role, the CEO is, as important as customers are, it’s broader. And the game of, running an electric company is a complex one. It can be a controversial one. There are a lot of stakeholders out there that have their own agendas. And navigating through the policy and the regulation and the reputation of it all can be really challenging. And, I found that when I spoke to Bob about that, he also had some really interesting takes about how to use communication to navigate stakeholder communication. So why don’t we listen in?

Bob Rowe:

One of the things that we’ve emphasized, is working directly with stakeholder groups, with local economic development officials, with local officials just as much as possible. So, when I joined Northwestern in 2008, our predecessor company had been through a liquidation bankruptcy, Montana Power. And had sold what some would say were our crown jewels, the generating fleet in Montana., Northwestern itself had been through a restructuring and bankruptcy to allow it to really focus on, being an electric and gas company. So rebuilding trust was really job number one. And that included employees and retirees, it included with policymakers and regulators, and it absolutely included with our customers. So, again, just being out, and being present was just absolutely critical. Job number two was focusing on our basic infrastructure, initially for delivery infrastructure. So that was the first situation where we pulled together a stakeholder group. and that was, the first of many opportunities for people to come together, very substantively, learn a lot, work a lot, and contribute a lot to how we thought about, our infrastructure planning and investment, so that was focused on distribution and we continued that process to look at, end to end infrastructure electric and gas transmission, we’ve used that process to look at some public policy issues.

Michael Maslansky:

So your philosophy of being open, of engaging with different stakeholders, of, really being kind of front-footed on this and communicating a lot. In my experience, it’s certainly not a universal approach. I think in many organizations, there will be people inside the organization that either say that it requires too much time and energy or you can’t satisfy everyone or it’s not the best path to achieving your goals. You obviously think differently. do you think a function of the market that you’re in, or our experience that the better way to get things done is you’re dealing with the extra time and effort to do this, but ultimately engaging much more with stakeholders?

Bob Rowe:

I would say it’s, yes, yes, and yes. Certainly, my background and inclination make that the most rewarding and productive way to get things done. It certainly is a function of the places where we all work and live on the great plains and in the rocky mountains. People do still talk to one another and there is that sense of, a common purpose, let’s say in a small community in, Nebraska, South Dakota, or Montana. But I absolutely do think that the industry is, very far along that path. And again, Michael, you’ve been key in helping us, get down that road. The biggest challenge perhaps is finding a common cause with the regulators who are such important stakeholders in recognizing that they and we share that deep commitment to doing the right thing by customers.

Michael Maslansky:

So I wanna pick up on the regulator point and question. And you’re a former regulator and again, if I reflect on the industries that we do work in as a firm, you know, we see that their regulators are different, sorts and different industries. So in financial services there are multiple regulators, in pharmaceutical industries there are multiple regulators and, you know, there’s often a question about how do you engage with, how do you talk to regulators? What kind of approaches to communication work most effectively with them?

Bob Rowe:

I think the most important thing to do, and this is more of a lesson in life rather than just in regulation, is to engage people when you’re not in front of them asking for something, and look for commonalities. And the commonality that everyone who works for an electric or a natural gas company has with everyone who regulates those companies is a deep commitment to safe, adequate service, and a deep commitment to customers. So when I was active as a state regulator, there was a theory that regulation could be completely replaced by antitrust. This was in the Clinton era, the passage of the Federal Telecommunications Act, state regulators, to their credit, created a customer affairs committee and that really parallels so much of the work that EEI is doing. So again, back to the question of why is regulation appropriate, to my mind, the core reason is that we are providers of critical infrastructure and essential services we are stewards. And in a sense, state regulators in particular are co-stewards. So, the challenge and the opportunity is to engage with those regulators in that spirit of shared stewardship expose them to our operations, the very, very technical side. Obviously, the grid controls systems, power plants, gas, and infrastructure as well. When we’re not in front of them in a rate review asking for something. The more they know about the systems that we operate, the more time they spend with our people, I think the better outcomes for everyone and certainly for customers. But to my mind, that idea of almost a shared stewardship of critical infrastructure and essential service, really ought to be the grounding for everything else that we do. Really, one of the most difficult topics has to do with the path we are on towards reducing carbon at the same time that we are maintaining adequate service and maintaining affordability. The industry, both on the natural gas side and the electric side, I think has done a tremendous job, meaningfully reducing carbon emissions in our operations. At the same time, we’ve continued to focus on our environmental stewardship. we have an absolute responsibility to maintain the reliability of the system, and some very wise state regulators and I recently participated in a panel chaired by the chair of the North Dakota Commission really do get that, and understand that going into this winter, for example, we have to have adequate resources, and we have to do what we can to continue to focus on affordability. In what is, sometimes, a very polarized discussion it’s pretty hard to reconcile both those positions, but that really is our responsibility. And it’s especially difficult I think to talk about the longer-term role of natural gas. If you’re sitting at one of the Reliability Councils you are likely, you know, very concerned about what’s happening in your region, near term and long term. And gas certainly appears to have a role to play there.

Michael Maslansky:

So, I would say, Bob, you know, one of the things that fascinates me about this industry, as somebody who is really interested in psychology and how people think and how people respond to different stimuli, different messages, is just how much this industry is a microcosm of some of the most difficult challenges to actually communicate. Asking people to make long-term decisions with short-term dollars is always a challenge, right? Paying today for something that may or may not, be clearly beneficial to them today but will benefit them in the future. Dealing with the trade-off between you know, those costs and those benefits. Dealing with the issues around climate change and extreme weather and stewardship as you talked about them. The political challenges of looking at renewable energy on the one hand and fossil fuels on the other, and trying to make smart choices for the environment and for customers, balancing affordability, reliability, and, a clean energy mix. I wanna focus for a minute on conservation and stewardship. And what fascinates me about that and to some extent where you live, is on the one hand, the culture out there, my sense of it is, you have a closer relationship with nature than certainly I do in New York City, right? And so the stewardship and the conservation component, and the kind of fundamental belief in supporting the environment is really strong. And yet, at least historically, I think maybe less so today there hasn’t been, always an embrace of renewable energy sources. At the same time, there’s often been much more support for fossil fuels in the broader energy mix in the west of the country. And so it creates, a really challenging environment I would think to talk about these issues with your customers.

Bob Rowe:

The more you can do it in person, and thoughtfully and over time, the better. And probably moving away from jargon as much as you can, and to some extent, even the phrase renewable can be a little bit problematic as opposed to talking about just the characteristics of the resource. We need something that we can count on to turn on and off. We need something that can run for a long period of time, 20 or 30 hours. What I would say is that the core in this part of the country, and not only here, is probably more pragmatic than anything else, when I kick off a new employee orientation every few months, what I like to do is start by asking folks a couple of questions. “Why did you want to work at NorthWestern? What do you like to do when you’re not working?” And it goes back over and over to fishing, hiking, hunting, camping, skiing, and spending time chasing my kids around from game to game, and all of those are things that do depend on the environment we all live here in part simply because we love it, but at the same time, everyone is very much (laughs) aware, of the weather, whether it’s hot in the summer or cold in the winter, and they’re very concerned to be sure that they’re able to keep their families safe and warm and their businesses operating during those times. So I would say, pragmatism, is probably the dominant characteristic. But, absolutely, they’re the same deep divisions here that there are everywhere else. And, I know your experience, my experience is that so often, because we are visible, because we have a strong local presence, we find ourselves at the center of those controversies.

Ben Feller:

There’s so much interesting fodder that Bob gave us there from the human connection to the environment to the elimination of jargon. But the thing that stood out to me the most was his comment about this being more of a lesson in life versus just regulation as – engage people when you’re not in front of them you know, asking for something and, finding the common ground. It’s so helpful and so counterintuitive, right? We, tend to reach out when we need something, and the people on the other end remember that. They also remember when you’re in touch with them when you don’t need something because you’re building a trusting relationship. You know, and of all the examples that worked on with you and, in previous roles, the one that comes to mind here that he’s speaking about for me was my journalism career covering the White House, where it was always my responsibility to find a reason to get people to talk to me. My reasons didn’t matter. I was after the story. So how do you get a source to talk to you? It’s the same way as, a lot of other things. Bob’s mindset in this was, I’m not here to try to win this. I’m here to try to solve this. It’s a big difference, right? I’m not trying to win this argument. Like, how do we find the common ground? So what I would do, I was assigned to cover and break the story of who President Obama was gonna choose as his first Supreme Court nominee. Incredibly challenging story, to win. And the White House put massive controls over that, and I knew I didn’t have a chance unless the White House knew what was in it for them. So I went to the point person in charge of that story and took ’em out for coffee, and I basically said, “Look, this is what I’m up against, and you’re not gonna wanna tell me, and I’m gonna want you to tell me, so this is how I’m gonna approach the story.” And I told them all of my tactics. I’m like, “I’m gonna talk to you. I’m gonna talk to other people. I’m gonna talk to people you don’t want me to. But the whole time, you’re gonna get fairness and accuracy and all that stuff that you hate, horse race stories, and who’s up and who’s down, I’m not gonna do that. It’s gonna be straight down the middle, and that’s my approach.” And they’re like, “Oh. So if we engage with you, we’re gonna get better coverage. If we don’t engage with you, you’re gonna cover it anyway. So at least we kind of know.” They weren’t used to somebody laying out the whole strategy (laughs) on the front end, but it was really the only chance they had, and they saw common ground, and, that built trust and, , helped right away.

Michael Maslansky:

That’s great. so, when you hear Bob talk about these things, it sounds so kind of common sensical, and yet I think we know often how rare it is that when you get into these situations with stakeholders who may have different agendas or who may be defensive, or not open to what you have to say, that there’s a fight mechanism that kicks in, that we get antagonistic and that we try and push our agenda onto them. We try and tell them why we are right., and Bob’s approach, which we certainly ascribe to, is so much different. This idea is that there is power in, finding common goals as the tool to use to move a conversation forward.

Will Howard:

Another kind of tactic that I see him talking about there. One, I always say in my personal life, that I think the fastest way to shortcut to a friendship with a stranger is either developing an inside joke or finding a common enemy. I would add to that list in this context when you’re thinking about communicating with stakeholders, the idea of a shared goal or a common goal being a really important thing to build around. It reminds me specifically of some work that we did a couple of years ago looking at how to communicate around one of the very topics that Bob hit on, which was the idea of climate change, and extreme weather. How do you go out and talk about a topic that is inherently polarized? And I think one of the things that we were looking at in that work was how best to communicate with the audience who were specifically skeptical on the topic and try to bring them on board. And I think one of the main things that we built our strategy around for approaching this audience was the idea that it’s very difficult to change someone’s mind by telling them that they’re wrong. If you start out from the footing of telling somebody what you disagree with or jumping straight to the parts of the conversation where you diverge, you emphasize the polarization. Whereas if you can find a common goal to build around … In this case with this audience, it was starting from a shared love of the outdoors, a shared love of their children and their communities building around the things people agree on, instead of jumping straight to the parts that they don’t, which is often the role that language plays when you bring in charged language like climate change, global warming, or even as Bob was alluding to, like green and renewable. These are the parts of the conversation that actually pull people farther apart. So, you wanna build some momentum with the part they can agree on first.

Lee Carter:

I love that case study, right? Because it is such a good reminder about focusing on what we have in common rather than just trying to push your agenda, but it even gets down to the details of the words that you avoid, right? So he talks about renewables in his story. He says, “Renewables is just a lightning rod.” Like that’s not the language to use. What we want is stuff that’s gonna be always on. , and it reminds me of so much of the work you do. Sometimes it’s just as important to know the language that you need to lose so that you don’t lose your audience. And we worked on a project once, and It wasn’t about artificial sweeteners, although this came up during the project. And it was one of those moments where you’d realize that certain words have such power. So, this beverage company was promoting their use of Stevia, which is a plant. It comes out of the ground. And everybody’s concerned about artificial sweeteners. So they were trying to talk about this artificial sweetener alternative, which is a Stevia plant. And every time they talked about the Stevia plant, the audience responded, “I don’t want an artificial sweetener.” And they’re like, “It’s a Stevia plant. I don’t understand. What’s the problem here?” What the audience was hearing was the word plant, as in you’re manufacturing Stevia, not a plant that’s in the soil in the ground that you water. And once (laughs) we’re understood that then we could start to change the way people talked about Stevia and the sweetener so that they understood that it was natural. But when you’re talking about something controversial, right? People’s barbs are up. They’re ready to be triggered. And if you’re not careful, you use the wrong language, you’re gonna trigger them and get them ready to fight rather than getting them ready to receive and listen to the message that you want to talk about.

Michael Maslansky:

So Lee, I think that picks up on two really important points. First, about this kind of controversial language where when you get into the language, particularly of climate, so many of the words that are used become coded, they become laden with all of this meaning from the political debate that is inescapable. And so you think that you’re just communicating about a concept, but really you’re communicating a whole political agenda. And part of the opportunity or the need when trying to find common goals is to use language that is not, coded language, not weighed down with all this political baggage. The other aspect, which, I think is part of the Stevia plant story as well is that if people don’t understand you, then it’s gonna be really hard to be effective in doing what you do. And there was a part of the interview that I covered with Bob that got to this idea of making sure that you were using a common language across all of these stakeholder groups and how important that ultimately is in achieving your goals. So let’s listen to that.

Michael Maslansky:

How about the language that we use? When you were a regulator, did you want lots of jargon? I mean, I’ve spoken to regulators over time about the benefits of using plain language, and they’ve said, not universal I’m sure, but wow. You know, just talk to me like a human being, because that way I’ll understand it better as a regulator, and also I can share the message more effectively with my stakeholders, with my constituents, so that they understand why we’re making the decisions that we’re making.

Bob Rowe:

Michael, I would say that you just nailed it. We all have tendencies to get very, very technical. And I can easily go off into nerd mode and it’s important, for me like everyone else, to get pulled back. You said something a few months ago that I thought was just right on target, which was that before anyone becomes a regulator, they were a customer. And after they stop being a regulator, they will be a customer. So first and foremost, talk to them as customers. And so, again, that’s why the basics of how you treat your customers, what’s the quality of your service, are you investing adequately in your infrastructure, how long does it take to get someone on the phone when you have a problem things like that really, really do matter. You said something else that I think is extremely important, too, talking about the responsibility to plan long-term, when we make so many decisions in sometimes the very, very short-term. You’ve talked about the relatively short tenure on average of CEOs. That’s also true of regulators. But we and the folks we work with really are responsible, several generations down the road, and that certainly includes environmental stewardship. But it also includes planning, and ultimately building the infrastructure, and thinking about how that infrastructure is going to change. And then do the best you can to explain that to customers in terms that they accept, rather than simply resorting to whatever our own professional jargon is.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, absolutely, and then doing it in a way that explains the business model that is very complicated and very foreign to anyone who doesn’t work in the industry, right? If I run a small business and I need to invest in new equipment I don’t get to automatically pass through the cost of that equipment to my customers. And yet, in some ways, that’s what electric and gas companies get to do over time because of the nature of the model. And so There’re many aspects of the economic model that are incredibly difficult to communicate to people who are not familiar with it.

Bob Rowe:

It’s a little bit through the looking glass, and of course, if you are that small business owner, you live or die based on what the market is doing and you move your prices up or down, depending on the market. And we don’t have, in the utility, in the electric and gas company we don’t have the ability to move our prices up when the market goes up. One of the challenges we have right now is explaining to customers why high energy prices are bad for us just the same as they are bad for the customers. We don’t make a profit buying energy and selling it. But typically that’s just adding bill pressure and crowding out other investments, or in fact, in our case, we incur fairly significant losses buying energy.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah. and so you raise the topic of rising energy bills, and I know that many customers, probably all customers to some extent, are going to be facing that this winter. And, you know, one question becomes there are a lot of reasons why natural gas prices, while why other fuel sources have gone up in price, and the question for energy companies becomes, “Okay, so, how do you explain this to customers?” As you said, you know, whether it’s trying to explain that it’s bad for the company, or that you don’t make a profit, or something else, you actually told me a great story when we were together about how you communicate with customers when they’re frustrated in situations where something didn’t turn out the way that they had hoped or expected. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Bob Rowe:

I think you may be referring (laughs) to a situation I had. Actually this was, my suitcases, my wife and I were traveling. Our suitcases got lost between one airline and another, and they’re like my two favorite airlines, as it turned out. The person I talked to, airline number one, wanted to explain to me how the baggage system works, and I was interested in that, actually. And, (laughing) my goal was merely to get them to call down to the baggage and see if they could find the suitcase. And ultimately they did, after I learned a lot about the baggage system. And when I called airline number two, these are, again, my two favorite airlines. Both have great customer service and reputations. The first person I spoke to said, “Oh, yeah, well, so is in the baggage room. I’m gonna call down and have them take a look for your luggage and then you stay on the phone,” and, yep, they found the luggage. So, knowing a little bit about the baggage system and why bad things happen to good companies is important. But ultimately, what customers do care about most is, “Is my heat on, are my lights on, and what does it cost?” But then knowing that the company that is providing that service is responsible, is a member of the community, I think, is awfully, awfully important, too. But we’ve got to talk to people the way they want to be talked to. And I’m just as guilty as anyone of falling into the techno trap.

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. I have one last question for you that I realize I better ask or comment that we’ve gone through this whole interview and you have not used the word utility. And we’ve talked a lot about the downside of that word, that about 30% of the population has a favorable opinion of their utility, but about 70% has a favorable opinion of their electric company or their electric and gas company. Do you use the term still? Have you tried to remove it from your vocabulary? Have you made progress in this area at all with, your company? I don’t know, I don’t know what my question really is, but-

Bob Rowe:

Yeah.

Michael Maslansky:

(laughs).

Bob Rowe:

Well (laughs), what I would say is it’s just like one of those words that sets my teeth on edge whenever I hear it. I mean a can opener is a utility.

Michael Maslansky:

(laughs).

Bob Rowe:

And the service we provide is very useful, very utilitarian, but it’s hard to think of any industry that has more of a local grounding than the electric and gas industry, and then I would add probably the water sector as well. But we build infrastructure that touches virtually every home, business, church, and school. We have employees in every community.  , they’re the people who show up for city council or to coach or to volunteer in the schools. They’re the people who have just as much impact, as the infrastructure. And at Northwestern Energy, I love our name, because it’s a sense of place and a sense of purpose.

Michael Maslansky:

Hm.

Bob Rowe:

And that to me doesn’t, sound much like a utility. And the folks I work with every day, to me, they’re not simply utensils. They’re people who do a great job and believe in what they do.

Michael Maslansky:

I love that. And we’re going to leave it there, Bob. Thank you so much for doing this. As usual, I learned a lot and I really enjoy spending time with you and can kind of feel your warmth through the call as well. And so thank you for taking the time. And I hope to see you out there on the slopes.

Bob Rowe:

Well, Michael, there’s no one I learn more from than you. And really, it is just all about understanding how people want to be talked to, what matters most to them, and then just meeting them to be able to have those conversations. So thank you very much.

Ben Feller (00:45:32):

You know, I think there’s so many examples in this industry, but really they cut across so many different industries where organizations default to jargon that they’re used to communicating about, or they use this sophisticated language with the stakeholders that they work with most closely, forgetting that ultimately there’s an end customer or a voter at the end of the conversation. And that it just reinforces again in such clear examples how important it is to find a common language for talking to your constituents.

Will Howard:

Yeah, I think this is a really big one across industries. I mean, there are a couple of ways that jargon like this can go wrong. I mean, the first is just that people won’t understand you. You’ll think you’re saying something and it simply won’t be getting through because the words you’re using don’t mean anything to the people you’re talking to. The second layer, which is even worse, is when people are misinterpreting you. So we think about the word plan, or we think about some of the polarized languages we just talked about. Not only is your intended meaning not getting through, but you’re actually leaving your audience with an entirely different impression than you thought they were. And then the third kind of subtly harmful way that I think this language impacts not your audience, but you and your organization, is language really does shape thought. And the way that you refer to something places it in a category in your mind and, and sets it up in a certain way. So when you listen to Bob talk about the word utility, , and the associations that come with utility, if your employees and your team are thinking in terms of we are a utility and talking about yourselves as a utility, that’s going to influence in subtle ways the behavior and the approach that you take to the work. A really, really important example of this, I think is back in the old days before we started working with the energy industry, they would refer to customers as ratepayers. And ratepayer is about one step better than a money bag or cash cow. Like, it’s a very almost pejorative way to think of your audience, and you’re setting up a very transitional interaction that would never fly in say the hotel business or the hospitality business where they make a point of referring to clients or guests. It really influences the way your organization and it’s actually a big driver of culture.

Ben Feller:

Well, I think the other point about this that comes to mind in listening to you is that it’s not only the ability and the responsibility that we have as leaders of companies and organizations and firms to convert jargon into plain language, we also have permission to do it. I think that’s something that gets lost, is when you get caught up in the jargon of a place, you begin to think that that’s how you’re supposed to talk. That’s, that connotes sophistication and you’re part of the club, and you lose the fact that actually, no we don’t have to do that, right? We have to stop and turn that language into the language that customers use, and that is something that came through so clearly from Bob. Again, it reminds me of back to my journalism days, there was a huge story for the region I was covering that they were finally gonna come together and have one place where all the transportation from the area was gonna be in one spot. And I said, “Great.” I said, “I’ll cover it, but I’m not gonna call it what you call it.” And they said, “But you have to call it what we call it. It’s our story.” I’m like, “Well, I’m not writing for you. I’m writing for the audience,” ’cause they wanted to call it an internodal transportation facility. I’m like, “No one’s gonna know what that means. And I said… They said, “What are you gonna call it?” I said, “It’s a high-tech center for trains and buses.” That’s what the average person will call it. They’re like, “But, but the, but the funding comes from the federal legislation and its uses…” I’m like, “That doesn’t matter to me. That’s your problem, right? I’m, I’m writing for an audience.” Bob doesn’t get caught up in “How are we supposed to call these things?” Just how do people talk? That’s what he said, like, “Talk to people how they wanna be talked to.” It’s such an important blueprint for executives.

Lee Carter (00:49:31):

You know, Ben I think you definitely have permission to do this, and I don’t think people think about it enough, but it is so important to the outcome. So we’ve spent a lot of time in healthcare, in financial services, in insurance, in addition to the energy industry, and one of the things that I found working with these organizations is that often, there’s legacy language you don’t even think about. So, my career started in the annuity space interestingly enough, when-

Michael Maslansky:

Weren’t you lucky?

Lee Carter:

I, (laughs) I was so lucky. I switched careers and industries and I came here, and my first project inevitably was about annuities. But here’s the thing about annuities that is interesting, is they were invented by actuaries. And everything about those products was described in actuary language. So what do you have? You have a death benefit. What the heck is a death benefit? It’s like a benefit of death?

Will Howard:

It’s an oxymoron, is what it is.

Lee Carter:

That sounds terrible. (laughs) And they talk about these death benefits that ratchet, and it’s like there are so many terrible pieces of language underneath these products because it’s legacy language nobody even thought about. It was built by this actuary who was really, really smart, and it just went on from there and people didn’t reconsider it. And then, you know, enter Michael Maslansky and, his team of language strategists, and the industry changed how they talked about things. It became ” We’re not about guaranteed income for life. We’re talking about projected growth.” All these different pieces of language, though, you don’t always consider, and it’s really important to take stock and make sure that you’re speaking the language of your customers.

Will Howard:

To bring it back to the theme of common ground, one of the things that’s seductive and dangerous about jargon is it’s created, in some ways, to make you part of a club. If you know the word, it’s because you’ve earned your way into that group or that industry, and you use it as a shorthand vernacular with other people who are in that industry with you. And you get used to talking that way and you feel proud to talk that way because it’s the way your industry talks. The bad news is it works. It creates a club. It creates an isolated team among the people who are using that language, and people outside can tell that those words aren’t for them. If you’re using language that’s only common among your employees and not among your customers, you’re separating your organization from the people that you work with or work for. , and if you use language that expands that community to include your audience, you’re creating that common ground across both audiences.

Michael Maslansky:

Will, that was a good way of bringing us to the end of this and kinda bringing together these themes that, you know, If we understand who our audience is when we try and achieve something, then often the best way to achieve that goal, whatever it is, is to find commonality, is to create a common experience between us and the audience that we’re trying to reach to set common goals so that we have a shared purpose with the people that we’re working with or often, at the beginning, across the table from but wanna be on the same side of the table with, and then using common language that everybody understands what it is that we’re talking about. And so it’s been great to have Bob to kinda share his experience, in the mountains of Montana and beyond, but I think that they’re really applicable for so many areas that we work in. So thank you all. It’s been a great conversation, Lee, Ben, and Will, so thank you.

Ben Feller:

Thanks for havin’ us.

Lee Carter:

Thank you.

Will Howard:

Thank you.

Michael Maslansky:

And thanks to our listeners. And for more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, please follow us on LinkedIn at maslansky + partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more episodes of hearsay because when it comes to truly effective communications, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.