By: Kandice Vincent
In 2009, Mike Dorsey stood in line for the Lightning Racer at Hersheypark, sizing up the people ahead of him and deciding that if they could fit, so could he. When his turn came, he sat down and pulled the lap bar toward him, and it wouldn’t lock. Two attendants came over and worked on it while the rest of the line watched, and when one of them said all they needed was one click, he remembers the crowd picking it up like a chant.
The bar never clicked. He climbed out, made the same walk he had made at a dozen other parks, and watched his friends ride without him.
“I was one click away from getting what I wanted,” he says. “I could smell it, taste it, see it, but I couldn’t have it.”
Today, Dr. Mike Dorsey is the founder and CEO of Michael Dorsey International (MDI), a Baltimore-based leadership and talent development company whose clients include the Association for Talent Development (ATD), the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), Amazon Web Services, Duke Energy, and PwC. He still tells the roller coaster story from the stage, because he learned early that almost everyone has a version of it. When he first shared it with friends, one of them said his own barrier had nothing to do with weight and kept him every bit as stuck. That conversation became Dorsey’s first book, The One Click Mindset, and the question that runs through all of his work now: what is standing between you and the thing you want, and which part of it is yours to own?
Life After the Ranch
In 2013, Dorsey joined Season 14 of NBC’s The Biggest Loser as the heaviest contestant in the cast, a college professor from Baltimore who mostly wanted to ride roller coasters again. He lost the weight, and for a while the show delivered everything it promised. He finally heard the click, and he made the rounds on the Today Show and in Us Weekly.
Within five years, most of the weight had come back, and the speaking career he hoped the show would launch had stalled. Dorsey is direct about why. “I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he says. “Looking back, I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t mature enough for it.”
Money was the more immediate problem. Two of the three colleges where he had taught as an adjunct didn’t bring him back after filming; his wife was out of work, and they had a newborn son at home. A friend told him to apply for food stamps.
Four Hours in a Waiting Room
Dorsey held two master’s degrees and was working on his doctorate when he filled out the application, and he did it online because that felt like the least embarrassing way. Weeks went by with no answer, and then a letter arrived saying part of his paperwork was missing. He went to the office and sat in the waiting room for close to four hours. When a staff member finally came downstairs, the security guard joked that she could have at least brought him a cupcake, and she shushed him and told him not to let anyone know they’d had a party.
Around the same time, Dorsey applied for a training job at a state agency, and it turned out to be the same agency. Within his first week, he was pulled into a customer service training pilot for the staff who handled food stamp cases, and when the person running it went on medical leave, the pilot became his. Three weeks later, he was delivering that training in the office where he had waited, and the woman from the cupcake party was sitting in the room.
“I’m convinced it stemmed from the fact that I had that experience,” he says of the customer service program he went on to lead, which the governor’s office liked enough to bring him in for its own work. He still keeps what is left of his food stamp card in his wallet.
A Decade Inside State Government
That job became a ten-year career with the Maryland Department of Human Services, where Dorsey eventually served as Chief Learning Officer and led talent development for more than 6,500 employees. Along the way, he finished a doctorate in organizational leadership, with research on generational differences at work, and became a Master Trainer for ATD.
Training had been the plan since college. As an INROADS intern with Walmart, he spent two weeks with the training and development team at headquarters in Bentonville and knew right away that was the work he wanted. Years later, he answered an ad for contract trainers, met a room full of people doing it for a living, and started his first business in the mid-2000s. “I didn’t know anything about starting a business,” he admits.
After the lean years, the state job gave his family stability. “Every other Wednesday, I knew I was getting a paycheck,” he says. He kept his own work going by presenting at ATD’s conference every year, and eventually ATD invited him to facilitate its certificate programs. He started taking leave from the state to teach them, and those engagements brought in more clients.
A mentor had once told him to leave that agency once he hit the ten-year mark, for several reasons, and suggested he could move to local or federal government and maybe come back after some time away. Dorsey stayed until he was vested, and by year eight he could feel his mentor’s advice coming due. “I was unsettled in my spirit,” he says. “I knew there was more.” What he lacked was faith that he could make it work on his own.
Leaving on His Own Terms
Dorsey stepped away from the state on September 9, 2024, a date he now calls his Independence Day and celebrates every year. He left reluctantly, and he admits he hadn’t fully believed in his own business yet. When a last-minute offer to return came in 2025, he took it.
He spent seven months back in state government and came out of it with clarity. “It proved that I wasn’t damaged goods,” he says. “My reputation with the state wasn’t severed, and I was able to leave on my own terms.”
He stepped down for good in March 2026, this time with no plan to return to full-time employment. He was 48. “It’s time,” he says. “I have to make this work. This is my life.”
Are You Owning Your Career or Renting It?
His second book, The Ownership Shift, came out in May 2026 and grew out of those same years. It’s written as a fable about a professional at a crossroads in his career, and the turning point comes when a mentor asks him whether he is owning his career or simply renting it. Readers complete the same exercises as the main character, so by the last page they have worked through their own version of his problem.
Dorsey breaks ownership into three parts: calling, or clarity about what you are supposed to be doing; voice, or whether you feel you have a say; and relationships, or whether anyone has taken the time to know you. When he brings those ideas to leaders, he asks them to look at their own side first. A manager watching an employee disengage can easily assume the person is being insubordinate.
“That’s too easy,” he says. “Maybe what’s going on is that they aren’t clear on what they’re supposed to be doing. Did I, as a leader, make it clear? Am I clear on why I’m here?”
His doctoral research shapes that view. Younger employees are far quicker than his generation was to leave a place where they don’t feel respected and seen, and he treats that as information leaders can act on. Much of his work comes down to helping people reconnect with whatever brought them to the job in the first place. “What was it that drew you here?” he asks. “And how can you take ownership of it?”
Building Michael Dorsey International
MDI exists to help individual contributors thrive at work. Most leadership development is aimed at people with titles, so Dorsey starts with the people at every level who do the work, while helping leaders build environments where ownership is possible.
The problem MDI is built to solve shows up in the numbers. According to Gallup, only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged at work during the first half of 2026. The firm estimates that employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged cost the U.S. economy about $2 trillion a year in lost productivity. Gallup also found that fewer employees feel their opinions count or feel connected to their organization’s purpose. Dorsey treats that as a performance problem that belongs on an executive’s desk as much as HR’s, and it maps directly onto calling, voice, and relationships. In his view, leaders are responsible for creating workplaces where people have clarity about their purpose, believe their contributions matter, and have real connections with the people around them.
MDI works on that problem from several directions. Keynotes and The LeaderShift Experience, a nine-month leadership cohort that graduated its first class on October 8, 2026, help leaders build teams where people know what is expected of them and feel heard. Emotional intelligence coaching and assessments sharpen how leaders communicate and handle pressure. His training and facilitation programs take on a problem many organizations know well: employees sit through training and then go back to work exactly as before. Dorsey designs learning so that what people practice in the room shows up in their performance afterward, which is also the premise of his upcoming ATD Press book. “When participants leave your training, are they simply impressed by what they experienced,” he asks, “or are they equipped to do something differently?”
Much of the company’s growth has come from people who saw him speak, including a December keynote for the State of Tennessee that came because they asked for him by name. A new name badge reading Founder & CEO arrived in the mail recently, and it meant more to him than he expected. “There was a time when MDI was an idea I was building on the side,” he wrote. “Today, I get to put on a badge that says Founder & CEO.”
He holds himself to the same standards he teaches. Since leaving the state, he has been sitting with a hard question about the team he once led. “Did I build a culture,” he asks, “or did I build a culture that depended on me?”
What Comes Next
ATD Press will publish his next book, Designing Training That Sticks, in spring 2027. He wrote it for talent development professionals, particularly the people who design training and the people who facilitate it, so that what they teach shows up in performance afterward. He also teaches for NRECA’s Supervisor and Management Development Program (SMDP), including courses at its CO-OP U event. On top of that, he hosts The One Click Podcast and is working toward his Certified Speaking Professional credential.
His bigger goals include the main stage at ATD’s international conference and a return to the Today Show. “If I’m going back to the Today Show,” he says, “it’s to be a guest.”
Off the stage, Dorsey is a husband, a father, an ordained minister, and still a devoted roller coaster fan. Organizations interested in booking Dr. Mike Dorsey for a keynote or leadership program can learn more at michaeldorsey.com.
