FARGO — The phrase, “I don’t know how she does it” might have been invented for Michelle Kommer.
She’s a former state labor and commerce commissioner who left the public arena in 2020 to rehab a 112-year-old tire warehouse into a headquarters and home for her business, HighRoad Partners, which provides human resources and benefits support to other businesses across the country.
She’s an attorney who graduated in the top 10 of her law school class while raising young children, and Kommer is a high achiever who has held high-powered legal, operational and human-resource positions in industries ranging from manufacturing to banking.
The mother of three is also a former foster parent who founded the North Dakota Heart Gallery as a way to find adoptive families for children in foster care. She’s also spent over a decade researching the importance of authentic, healthy female relationships in the workforce and would like to publish a book on that topic someday.
On top of all this, Kommer seems down-to-earth and personable and — dare we say it? — nice.
“Initially, it was a very conscious, difficult effort to retrain my brain, and stop seeing other women through a lens of competition or threat,” she told The Forum. “Today, it’s completely natural — I see other women as a source of inspiration and opportunity to make a new friend.”
It also helped that Kommer’s own career started off with a powerful female mentor. That was Mona Flaten of Community First Bankshares, who hired Kommer right out of college.
“Mona hired me for potential, and I learned how to be a strong leader while being myself — that you can be firm but kind, direct but compassionate, and effective but not at the expense of others,” Kommer says today.
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‘Say yes to what scares you’
When Kommer was contacted in 2016 with an offer from then Gov. Doug Burgum to be the state’s next labor commissioner, she recalls two immediate, conflicting reactions:
“My brain said, ‘This is crazy,’ and my mouth said, ‘That sounds fun.’”
Then again, that’s how Kommer has built her career: She simply leaned into whatever scared her and did the job anyway.
Whether that resilience came from the “you can do it” conviction of her parents or the constant recalibration required from moving 11 times as a child, her determination to work through fear served her well.
Kommer’s parents — Mike Worner, a high school administrator-turned-education professor, and Marilyn Worner, a special education teacher — moved their family around the Midwest for various career opportunities.
When Michelle was in high school, they settled in Mayville so her dad could teach at Mayville State University.
After agreeing with her dad to attend Mayville State one year, she liked it so much that she graduated from the small school.
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Her original plan was to attend law school after college, until she learned of an auditing internship with the federal government.
She was so scared to live and work in Washington, D.C., that she almost left the plane before it took off. Thankfully, she didn't — and eventually got to fly to places throughout Europe and Africa to audit embassies.
“My parents raised us to work hard and not give up, and to keep learning. I learned early that saying yes to scary things led to learning, career advancement and was also rewarding and fun,” she says.
'My boss, my mentor and my friend'
She returned home to work in Sen. Kent Conrad’s Fargo office then landed another auditing position with Community First Bankshares in Fargo. Her future mentor, Mona Flaten, hired her.
“Mona was my boss, my mentor and my friend,” Kommer said during a TEDx Fargo talk, “Women For (not vs.) Women.” “She had a unique knack for being my warmest supporter but she could also not so warmly call BS on me when I deserved it — and I did sometimes.”
Years later, Kommer asked Flaten why she’d hired her. “It’s because I knew I could learn something from you and I knew I could help you learn something.”
Although Flaten would die at age 47 in a motorcycle accident, Kommer never forgot what her role model taught her in terms of the importance of female relationships in the workplace.
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While at Community First, Kommer worked her way up to heading human resources, where she learned an important lesson.
“That’s where I learned that businesses are not a two-legged stool of just finance and operations,” she says. “It's three. The third one is people. And that's where I fell in love with HR, and saw for the first time the importance of human beings and feelings and that above everything else is the difference.”
‘We had a baby each year of law school’
In 2004, Kommer enrolled in law school at the University of North Dakota.
By then, she was married and had small children. For three years, she got up early every day to commute to UND. They were also foster parents at the time, “so we had a baby each year of law school,” she says.
Kommer still managed to graduate in the top 10 of her class.
Why? She thinks she learned to use time wisely. “You are absolutely managing every second of your time,” she says. “I carpooled most of those three years with a woman who became my best friend. And she too had had children and had a baby our third year of law school. But we studied in the car. We read out loud to each other. We used every minute. You had to.”
As a lawyer with human-resources experience, she landed a diverse assortment of responsible positions with big companies, including Ottertail Company, Noridian Insurance and Western State Bank.
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Ryan Moen, now chief information officer at Western State Bank, was hired by Kommer when she was chief administrative officer and general counsel for the bank. He worked for her for over two years.
He attributes her success to three characteristics: lifelong learning, a driven nature and a certain fearlessness.
As a manager, Kommer was supportive of her team but also held a high level of standards for them, as well as for herself, he says.
At the same time, Moen believes Kommer also recognized her employees were humans with real-life struggles. “If someone needed to take care of themselves or attend to something, she was always very supportive of those things,” he says.
“All in all, I would say she’s a fantastic person professionally and personally,” he says.
Big help for small business
By 2016, Kommer had mainly worked for companies that employed thousands. It wasn’t until she joined the state’s Labor and Commerce divisions that she saw up close the unique challenges of the small business owner.
Kommer learned the vast majority of North Dakota employers had fewer than 50 employees. “The heart and soul of our state is small players,” she said. “And so it was those employers who were what I would call working managers — trying to build their company and do the work, but also be HR, be finance, be accounting. Yes. And that's where things were kind of breaking down.”
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She found that in over 90% of the cases where employees made claims against their employer for wage and hour law or discrimination laws, the employers’ errors were unintentional.
The lesson: Every company needs HR expertise, whether they employ two people or 200. “We always say that our clients are absolutely smart enough to figure out the new FMLA provisions, but is it the best use of their time, rather than growing their business?” she says.
HighRoad offers services such as payroll, HR compliance, benefits administration, recruiting, background checks, onboarding and payroll surveys.
They can help employers develop job descriptions that Meet Fair Labor Standards Act requirements and help attract candidates who are a good fit for the employer’s values and culture.
They also guide a business when an employee doesn’t fit. “We will not come in and fire someone on your behalf,” Kommer says, “but we will role play with you. We will coach you. We will give you talking points. And of course, throughout all of that, we're helping you do that in a both legal and compassionate way. But we are not (hatchet man) George Clooney in the movie, ‘Up in the Air.’”
Clients also have access to HighPoint’s HR-management platform, which would otherwise be cost-prohibitive for most small businesses. This fully-integrated system supports the entire employee life-cycle from applicant management to performance management, timekeeping and payroll, Kommer says.
Women for (NOT ‘vs’) women
No sooner had Kommer made it known she planned to start HighRoad did people from her past workplaces start approaching her about joining her team.
“So the folks that I work with today are all connections of mine or connections of connections. And that was just a wonderful compliment,” she says.
Although it was never a deliberate choice on her part, she wound up with an all-female team. It’s not surprising: According to research by Mercer, a global consulting firm, women make up 70% of the HR workforce in Asia, Europe and North America.
“My goal is to create a place where these wonderful women come to work every day and feel valued and can work to their strengths and have what I call real flexibility,” she says. “A lot of women who have been in the workplace have worked at places that claim flexibility, but you still get the stink eye when you’re walking out because your kid is sick.”
HighRoad walks the talk by allowing employees to make their own schedules. “We have a number of people who don’t work a full 40-hour week on purpose,” she says. “When I hire, I say, ‘How much do you want to work, and let me know if that changes. And what do you want your hours to be?’ And then we reverse-engineer how to serve our clients with excellence.”
One of the most essential people to come on board was Chief Experience Officer Carla Koening, who has worked alongside Kommer through three different jobs over the last 20 years.
“She is the yin to my yang,” Kommer says, “and I absolutely could not do it without her.”
They work in a sprawling, 7,000-square-foot building at 209 NP Ave N., which melds the aged beams and exposed brick of the 1913 building with a posh, black-and-white color palette.
“We encourage dogs and babies at work,” Kommer says, while clicking down the long hallways on stiletto-heeled, animal-print booties. As part of that, the office includes a mother’s room; an exercise room, and a mini-spa area with weighted blanket, massage chair and sauna. (Kommer’s “commute” to work is about 2 minutes long, as she lives in a gorgeous flat on the second floor.)
Art posted throughout the workspace champions female success, from the restroom featuring a wall of motivational messages in powder-pink hues to the photo of her grandmother, Mabel Kachelhoffer, from when she graduated from Mayville State (then Mayville Normal School) in the early 1900s.
It all ties in with what Kommer has learned via research and experience: When women can move from an adversarial to a supportive place with each other, beautiful things can happen.
“What can I learn from her? And how can I help?’ are two questions we should ask ourselves to help us have healthy, supportive, authentic relationships with women in the workplace,” Kommer once said. “Understanding female relationships in the workplace has changed my life.”
The Trust Project
