Michael Tessin has spent his career in state government doing what most leaders say they want to do but rarely accomplish: creating environments where employees dread Sunday nights less than Monday mornings. Where a twenty percent pay raise from a competitor isn't enough to poach your best people. Where former employees become your strongest recruiters.
In this candid conversation, Mike shares the philosophy and practices behind these results—starting with his own why. A former substance abuse counselor and probation officer, he found his calling in helping people "write new endings." That purpose scaled as he moved into leadership: take care of your people, and they take care of their people, and that translates down to communities.
But the stories are where the learning lives. A health facility with over 500 beds was in crisis—media coverage, leadership scrambling for solutions. Mike remembered Bryan Stevenson's principle: if you want to help, you have to get proximate. They started listening tours at shift change, 7 AM and 7 PM, one unit at a time. A veteran told them the tattered flag at the facility was dishonoring to someone who'd fought for this country. Simple fix—call facilities on the drive home. A nurse said, "You're stealing from me every day I work." The payroll system auto-deducted thirty minutes for lunch that nurses never took, requiring paperwork to reclaim time they didn't have time to document. They flipped the system. Getting proximate meant they could finally hear what they'd been blind to.
Mike shares the moment he realized he'd been "stealing motivation" from a top performer by telling her he never gives fives on evaluations. Six months later, he sat down and defined exactly what a five would look like in every category. "I saw it go game on. Her body language changed. She started showing up differently."
The pandemic forced adaptation. Virtual was taboo in government—you don't do virtual visits with probationers. But they learned work could still get done, and some things worked better virtually. Parents on dependency cases were more likely to be compliant when they didn't have to arrange childcare and transportation just to check in with a case manager. For his extroverted self, Mike had to "take the informal and make it formal"—instant messaging someone just to say hi, walk-and-talk supervisions where both people strolled their own neighborhoods on cell phones, video game staff meetings to generate the laughter that's "the shortest distance between any two people."
His framework: psychological safety plus high-stakes winnable games. Not chasing employee happiness—"I can't be responsible for somebody else's happiness"—but creating space for people to find purpose and discover joy in their work. The data matters, but only in a safe environment. "The data doesn't say you're bad. The data says we have a problem, and we have to find a solution."
Mike's closing charge lands hardest: "If you don't heal the parts of you that are broken, you're gonna bleed all over people who never cut you." Leaders must do their work—therapy, coaching, reading, journaling, meditation. "There is no single archetype of good leadership. All of us have to discover the leader inside of us."
Learning Objectives
- Understand connection as the foundation of government workplace effectiveness—people enter public service to make a difference, and disconnection from mission, team, or leadership undermines that purpose
- Create high-stakes winnable games that help employees understand how their work connects to mission and whether they're making a difference
- Build psychologically safe environments where data reveals problems to solve rather than people to blame, and where tough conversations happen because leaders care about growth
- Develop intentional hiring practices that match people to roles based on characteristics and virtues needed for success, not just replication of past hiring patterns
