By: Chanel Frances
Brian Watkins had been at Midas International for less than a week when he sat down to lunch with a new vice president and asked the question everyone else in the building was whispering. It was around 2008. Watkins had just been promoted past five colleagues with more tenure, and word around the office was that this executive, Mike Gould, had little respect for training. So Watkins asked him, point blank, what would be different this time. Today, as founder and president of BTOM Consultants, Watkins still tells that story, because the answer shaped everything he has built since.
Gould told him he fully supported good training. His objection was reserved for sessions that waste people’s time. He went on to become one of the best managers Watkins ever had, and whenever someone pushed back on a training initiative, he settled it with one line: “I don’t know training, that’s why I have you.”
A manager who trusted his people, backed them publicly, and let them do their best work is exactly what Watkins wants every employee to experience. He launched BTOM Consultants in June 2020 from Buffalo Grove, Illinois, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, with a mission he states without hedging: to rid the world of bad managers.
The numbers explain the urgency. Roughly 82 percent of people who become managers receive no formal management training before stepping into the role (Source: Chartered Management Institute, 2023). Around 60 percent of new managers fail within their first 24 months (Source: CEB, now part of Gartner). And managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement (Source: Gallup, 2015).
“Too many people still picture Michael Scott,” Watkins says. “Management is one of the most critical positions in any organization.”
The Moment He Knew
Watkins spent more than 25 years in learning and development at companies including Midas, Sears, CD One Price Cleaners, Midtown Athletic, and Abbott Laboratories. The moment he knew he had become a great manager came at Midas, when he joined a task force working alongside Boston Consulting Group. The company was losing profit share in its most profitable business, and leadership wanted to know why and how to reverse it.
One piece of the answer fell to Watkins and his team: build a new, robust training program. The goal was to grow sales in that business by 5 percent without cannibalizing the rest of the company. Watkins and his team designed the rollout so they could run a rigorous statistical analysis of the training’s impact, something notoriously hard to do in corporate learning.
The results were striking. Stores that took and implemented the training saw 9 percent growth in the targeted business and an overall sales increase of almost 15 percent. Stores that skipped it saw sales fall by more than 3 percent. The work earned Watkins’ team a Gold Award from the American Society for Training and Development, where they competed against organizations including Google, Microsoft, and the Department of Defense.
“That could only have happened with the skills and effort of the team and the relationships I built as I learned to be a great manager,” he says.
Leading by Serving
Watkins describes himself as a servant leader, and he believes in it enough to wear it every day. A tattoo on his forearm reads “Hominis Pro Allis.” The literal translation is “man for others,” and Watkins reads it as mankind serving others. “The best managers and leaders focus on getting the most out of their people,” he says. “The way you do that is by serving them, helping each person become comfortable and successful in their own way.”
BTOM runs on five values: dignity, growth, honesty, service, and wisdom. Watkins pairs honesty with dignity on purpose. “Softened messages get lost,” he says, “so I’m direct, and I make sure people know it comes from a good place.”
Wisdom, for him, means constant learning, and it starts every morning. He reads Harvard Business Review daily to keep up with the latest research, along with Inc. and Fast Company, which usually offer an article or two that connects to his work. He skims Business Insider, Morning Brew, Bloomberg, and the 1440 Daily Digest for a pulse on the world, and fills in the rest with TED Talks and whatever friends send his way. Many of those reads become topics for his weekly Great Manager newsletter on Substack.
His biggest intellectual influences come from the same shelf. He calls Gallup’s Jim Harter, co-author of “It’s the Manager,” the author of the new bible for managers. He draws on Adam Grant’s research on how people think and what motivates them, and he is still digesting Aiko Bethea’s “Anchored, Aligned, Accountable,” which he expects to shape both his thinking and the management industry.
The Octopus Approach
When something goes wrong, Watkins gets curious. A former coworker once told him his professional superpower was being an octopus: he keeps shifting his grip and trying new angles until a problem comes loose. After any outcome, good or bad, he asks two questions, and he teaches every manager he works with to ask them too. What went well? What would I do differently next time?
That practical mindset drives his signature offer, the Great Manager Operating System, which helps first-time managers build engaged, accountable teams in 90 days. The program covers eight core behaviors: giving feedback, developing relationships, setting expectations, delegating, developing people, coaching, making decisions, and motivation and rewards. Each behavior gets a single 45-minute session. Managers take a real task back to their teams that week and debrief it the following week.
Clients sometimes ask him to condense everything into one full-day workshop, and he holds firm. “Cram a full day of concepts together and people remember one or two ideas without ever practicing them,” he says. “Spacing it out lets the skill build without overwhelming anyone.”
The approach holds up in the field. When the Hinsdale Humane Society went through a complete staff restructuring, every person on the team was new to their role during a period of major change. Together with Watkins, they set five specific engagement targets. After adopting the program, the team exceeded all five, along with several others.
Relationships First, Feedback Second
At the center of Watkins’ philosophy sits one belief: relationships have to be built on purpose and kept up over time. He makes regular one-on-ones mandatory, and the employee owns the agenda. “If they want to talk about a project, great,” he says. “If they want to talk about their weekend or their dog, that’s great too.”
When he visits client sites, he often asks team members about their lives, such as a spouse’s name or how old their kids are. Later, he quizzes their manager on the same details. A manager who comes up empty has learned something important about their own team.
Once the relationship is in place, feedback becomes the tool that changes people. Watkins compares good feedback to a gas gauge: simple information that tells you where you stand. He also brings a calm that took years to develop. “Calm is contagious,” he says, borrowing a Navy SEAL saying, “and so is panic. A team feeds off its leader’s energy.”
Looking ahead, he wants the next generation to see the meaning in the role. “Outside of a spouse or partner, a manager has more day-to-day influence on someone’s life than almost anyone,” he says. “I’d rather hear from someone I managed years ago that I made a difference than get any raise.”
Life Beyond the Office
Outside of work, Watkins is adding more fiction to a steady diet of biographies and business books. He is a lifelong Green Bay Packers fan who owns a share of Packers stock, and since moving to Illinois he has adopted the Cubs too. His wife, Theresa, got him into paint-by-numbers, which has become a real hobby. The couple met through his best friend from Milwaukee, who married her best friend from Chicago. The two couples are godparents to each other’s kids, and because both friends have a brother named Brian, those kids call him Uncle Bobo.
For aspiring leaders, his advice is grounded in impact. “Go after it for the difference you’ll make in people’s lives,” he says. “That’s what carries you through the stress.” He encourages leaders to manage up by asking questions like “Have we thought about this?”, to document the value they create, and to take a lesson from another early manager, Rosy Jenneman: quality is what gets people fired, so spending a bit more for a better result is almost always worth it.
Managers and leaders ready to build stronger teams can learn more about the Great Manager Operating System at BTOM Consultants and join the weekly conversation on the Great Manager Substack, where Watkins shares practical lessons drawn from 25 years of helping people grow into the managers their teams deserve.
