Congratulations to Mike Bacnis, Finance/Accounting Supervisor for DES/FBOD, for winning the 2023 Best-Run Government Leadership Excellence Award for a People Leader.

The Executive launched the Best-Run Government Awards – formerly known as the Performance Excellence Awards – in 2018 to recognize individuals and project teams In the Executive branch for their exceptional contributions in innovation, leadership, and continuous improvement at King County.

The Leadership Excellence Award for a People Leader honors someone who manages staff and has made significant and tangible leadership contributions to developing the Executive branch values in others, improving our workplace culture, and leading organizational change and inspiring others to lead change as well.

While Mike is currently the Accounts Receivable supervisor, he exemplified the ‘We Are One Team’ value and provided leadership coverage to both the Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable teams for six months. During this time, he provided day-to-day management support for the 14 employees of the Accounts Payable team, ensuring that over 45,000 invoices, representing just over $2 billion, were paid in a timely manner during a critical transitionary period. 

Despite covering two teams, he worked on multiple high-impact projects:

• Updating the Accounts Receivable Executive Policy,
• Improving the banking structures that support procurement card use at the County, and,
• Assisting the Department of Public Defense with a rate adjustment that reduced or eliminated the co-pays for legal services provided by the County.

Mike has established a culture in his teams where problems are opportunities, so when the team identified that payments made through a portal on KingCounty.gov, which should require minimal manual work, were landing in a queue for manual processing, Mike worked with KCIT and quickly reduced the number of invoices being misdirected.

The number of manual payments dropped by 2,000 payments or 12% from 2022. There were at least two factors that drove this improvement — making the portal user friendly (a collaboration with KCIT he empowered his team to contribute toward) and the quick fix Mike achieved that was causing payments to be sent to the manual processing queue in error, noted above.

Mike leverages his two decades of experience at King County, the relationships he has made during that time, and the reputation he has worked hard to earn and sustain as a person who gives wise counsel to affect change where it is needed. One of his Accounts Payable colleagues recently stated, “Mike is a true leader who is always there to provide support for his team in a very professional manner.”

As a leader, Mike builds teams that consistently exceed expectations for delivering results by promoting a culture of innovation and problem-solving, empowering team members to raise opportunities to make their own lives or the lives of their customers easier and better, and empowering team members to solve problems while removing barriers.

“Mike leads by example, showing his teams direct and effective ways to apply the values in their collective work,” said Ken Guy, Division Director, DES/FBOD. “He then challenges and empowers them to follow his lead.”

Thank you, Mike, for being a champion of innovation and continuous improvement.