From job counselor to healthcare operations leader, Sofya Mikhelson has spent more than two decades finding the larger purpose hiding inside operational work. Now, she’s rebuilding how one of Minnesota's largest health systems manages every contract it signs.
Ghadeer Redler
Head of Multimedia, Thought Leadership & Customer Stories
Workday
In 1992, Sofya Mikhelson arrived in the United States from Belarus with a six-month-old child, a husband, and a deep sense of forward-looking optimism. The Soviet Union was falling apart. Normal had stopped being normal. And Mikhelson, who had trained as an elementary school teacher, was looking not backward at what she was leaving, but forward at what she might build.
"I came to this country," she says simply. "I never looked back."
It's a phrase that, once you understand how her career has unfolded, begins to feel less like a personal motto and more like a governing philosophy. At every stage of her professional life, from nonprofit outreach worker, to job counselor, to county contract manager, to the vice president of supply chain and contract lifecycle management at Fairview Health Services, Mikhelson has had a habit of arriving somewhere, identifying the larger problem underneath the one she was hired to solve, and quietly moving toward it.
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Mikhelson didn't set out to build a career in contracting—she wanted to serve people and her community.
After earning a bachelor's degree in psychology at State University of New York and later a master’s in business, she spent years working in community facing roles, first at a small nonprofit in upstate New York, then in Minnesota, where she helped people transitioning off of government assistance to connect with transportation and employment.
When she joined Hennepin County, one of the largest counties in the United States, it was as a job counselor, helping immigrants navigate the path to self sufficiency, then moved to support other programs like child protection and housing and homeless initiatives provided by non-profit organizations.
"When you're working with community organizations and the government, there are always contracts involved."
That observation was the pivot point. She realized that contracts were not just paperwork, but the conduits through which money flowed from federal to local levels, and the frameworks upon which programs were built, monitored, and evaluated. Compliance, risk, and vendor relationships—all of it relied on these documents that most people dismissed as mere administrative afterthoughts. Mikhelson began to view them instead as the connective tissue of the work she cared about most.
Little by little, over 13 years at Hennepin County, she moved from doing the work to building the systems that made the work possible. From job counselor to program developer. From program developer to contract manager. From contract manager to supervisor to, ultimately, manager over most of the contracting in the county's Human Services and Public Health division.
“If anybody would have told me 25 years ago that I would build a career based on contracts, I would have hardly believed it!” she says, laughing.
"When you're working with community organizations and the government, there are always contracts involved."
Mikhelson was running her department at Hennepin County, and by her own account, she was happy. However, an interesting contracting role opened at Fairview Health.
She joined as director of contracting in supply chain, stepping into a system that was, in many ways, performing well. Fairview is not a small organization - it comprises 10 hospitals, including the University of Minnesota Medical Center, more than 80 primary and specialty care clinics, 37 retail and specialty pharmacies, and a senior care network, all supported by a workforce of over 30,000 employees. Contracts touch every corner of that operation.
But as Mikhelson learned the landscape, she began to see something familiar: the larger problem underneath the one she'd been hired for.
Over time, the scope of Mikhelson's work at Fairview expanded organically. Purchased services contracts came her way because of her background, and soon IT contracts followed. And as her perspective broadened, a pattern became clear.
Across Fairview, there are roughly 10 different contracting divisions doing good work, each with its own processes, its own expertise, its own standards. But there was no shared center of gravity. Business owners sometimes didn't know which unit to go to. Spend visibility was fragmented. Standards and vendor management practices varied across divisions.
"We are in a very good position," she reflects. "We just want to do something greater."
That framing, moving from good to truly exceptional, became the heart of the initiative she would go on to lead. And as any leader who has tried to make the case for transformation without a visible crisis can attest, it is a harder argument to make than one anchored in emergency.
"When something is really broken, it's easy to go to a team and say, this is horrible, we have to fix it," she acknowledges. "It's a lot harder to create change when something's actually pretty good."
Mikhelson’s strategy was as deliberate as it was inclusive, beginning with a deep dive into the contracting ecosystem to map the gaps and surface the organization’s true needs. She didn’t work in a vacuum; instead, she built a bridge between varying leadership priorities, weaving together the analytical discipline of supply chain with the CFO’s focus on revenue and IT’s technical landscape.
This collaborative groundwork transformed the project into a shared mission, eventually culminating in a steering committee that brought 10 vice presidents from every corner of Fairview together to design a unified future.
"It's a lot harder to create change when something's actually pretty good."
Mikhelson co-led this cross functional initiative alongside John Marshall, vice president of enterprise pharmacy services. Their leadership centered on rigorous facilitation, ensuring that each meeting served to transform the committee’s disparate insights into a concrete strategic framework.
"You bring 10 of the brightest minds in the room, you will never end the conversation if it's not facilitated in the proper way," she says.
The process required preparation for every single meeting. No wasted time. No unstructured debates. And critically, it had c-suite backing from the beginning, which transformed the exercise from a nice to have into an organizational priority.
The outcome was a new governance structure: an independent contract lifecycle management division with enterprise-wide standards, housed outside of other contracting divisions, deliberately positioned to serve all of them without being owned by any. A Contracting Excellence Committee emerged to anchor cross divisional oversight and ensure governance remains a living practice rather than a compliance checkbox.
The vision is simple: total clarity. Fairview’s staff should have a single 'front door' for contracting—a central hub where, with just a few clicks, their requests are automatically routed to the right team. Whether it’s for pharmacy, supply chain, or specialized services, every step will be standardized. By linking these contracts directly to payments, the ERP system will track every dollar to ensure it’s being spent wisely and effectively.
"Contracts for purchasing services and goods don't exist without the payments," Mikhelson says. "If we cannot do the spend management, we're missing an enormous part of the contracting work."
Mikhelson works at the operational core of a large health system. Her days are full of contract structures, governance frameworks, vendor management processes, and technology roadmaps. It is, by any measure, administrative work, the kind that rarely makes the front page. And yet she is one of the most mission-driven leaders you will find in healthcare operations.
It comes back to something she has carried with her since her first job counseling immigrants at Hennepin County, since her transportation coordinator role connecting welfare recipients to jobs, since her first months at that small nonprofit in upstate New York working with kids.
"Every time when I'm working on contracts, in the back of my mind, I know why I’m doing it. If we don’t get it right, it’s more than a monetary expense at hand—it affects everyone who walks through our doors looking for care.”
Fairview's mission statement, to make health happen with human compassion, runs through the organization's emails, its meetings, and its operating philosophy. For Mikhelson, it doesn't feel like a slogan. It feels like a description of what she has been doing her entire career, in different forms, across different roles, at different institutions.
She has always been in the business of making things work for the people who need them most. The contracts just turned out to be one of the most powerful levers for doing that.
If there is one piece of advice Mikhelson would give to someone earlier in their career, it is this:
"Go with something that you're passionate about. You spend so many hours a day at your work, if you're not enjoying it, it's going to be really hard."
She would know. From an elementary school classroom in Belarus to the contracting suite of one of Minnesota's largest health systems, every step she has taken has been toward something she believed in. She didn't always know where the path was going. But she always knew why she was walking it.
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