The Corporate Social Worker: Mitch Bliven on Finding the Work You're Wired For

Some kids dream of being astronauts. Mitch Bliven wanted to be a short order cook.

He actually did it for years, and he still lights up describing a busy Saturday night in a kitchen, "running as fast as you can, and it feels like you're almost dancing between all the different stoves." His other childhood dream was stand up comedy. Neither is what he does today. But if you listen to how he tells his story, both make a strange kind of sense.

Mitch is the founder of Genius Network Solutions in Hudson, Wisconsin, and a guest on East Side Enterprise. He helps people and teams figure out the work they are naturally wired for. He also describes himself, only half joking, as a "corporate social worker." To understand what that means, you have to go back to a stretch of his twenties that he does not sugarcoat.

The winding path

Mitch went to college for business, because when you do not know what you want, business seems like a safe bet. It did not take. He describes sitting across from an academic advisor "with a whole can of hairspray in her hair and a giant golden brooch in a blue pantsuit," while he sat there "in my PJ pants and a holey t-shirt," thinking, "this is not my world."

The one piece of career advice that ever landed for him was simple: do what is worth doing without the money attached. People had always dumped their problems on him, so he switched to social work. About two years in, he realized he "did not have the empathy to be a social worker." Then he became a police officer. Roughly two years into that, his chief told him, "You don't think like the rest of us. I don't think you're meant to be a police officer." Mitch agreed.

By 24, he had two careers behind him and a divorce. He does not dress it up. He went and did construction, "just to learn a trade, learn how to use a tape measure." Eventually he found data. Spreadsheets, of all things, became the first place he could put his restless curiosity to work. "You could ask a question of data and see what comes out the other side."

The ten minutes that explained ten years

There was a pattern underneath all of it. Every 18 months or so, Mitch would burn out. "After the third time this happened," he says, "it's like, okay, it looks like it's me, not the job."

He was working at a company that took professional development seriously. They used three assessments just to hire him, then sent over a fourth, called the Working Genius. Mitch took it, and something clicked.

"In a 10-minute test, I got 10 years of understanding of my burnout."

The Working Genius, created by Patrick Lencioni, breaks work into six types. For Mitch, the revelation was that his genius is wonder, the pondering, the "why do we do it this way, is there a better way." The parts that had been quietly draining him for years were different ones. He finally had language for it.

Two years later he was laid off. He had savings, a habit picked up from a father who told him to "put the money in a big pile behind you," and he made a decision: "I'm really passionate about this, and for my health, I kind of have to." Genius Network Solutions became the place where his social work training and his love of data finally met. "Working Genius is the best data we have on people," he says. "It measures where do you find joy and where do you find pain."

The question no one asks

The through line of the whole conversation is a question Mitch says we almost never ask each other: where do you find joy in work?

He tells a story about opening a one on one with exactly that question. "He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. In 30 years, no one has ever asked me that." Mitch says that reaction is the rule, not the exception. He asks people all the time when a leader last sat down for an hour to ask where they find joy and where they find pain in their work. "I've found one or two people out of hundreds."

His point is not soft. In an affluent area like the East Metro and St. Croix Valley, where the basics are largely handled, he argues that helping people do work that fits is a real and valuable problem to solve, for the person and for the employer both. "When you can find that flow state, it adds up so much more. Both sides win."

What building something actually feels like

Mitch is refreshingly honest about the cost of starting a business. He describes the early days of GNS as feeling "very much like drowning." He began with 52 LinkedIn connections and no idea what networking even was. And he names the feeling most owners recognize but rarely say out loud.

"The ability to wake up feeling like a failure, work all day really, really hard, and go to bed feeling like a failure, and being okay with that. That's a really hard lesson to learn."

His advice to his younger self is the emotional center of the conversation: be patient, and be kind to yourself. He points to Steve Jobs and the calligraphy class Jobs took years before it ever shaped the first Mac. "Looking forward, you don't know what's going to happen. Looking back, you have clarity."

Listen to the full conversation

This is a small slice of a long, wandering, genuinely fun conversation that also gets into connection versus dopamine, why community is harder to find as an adult, what AI is doing to the nature of work, and why a little suffering might be good for you.

Listen to the full episode of East Side Enterprise with Mitch Bliven at mckinneycv.com/podcast, or on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Mitch's work at leadwithgns.com.