Before you send a staff member to a back room in your store or to a hotel meeting room somewhere to go through a training program, have the staff member set objectives for the training. What skills do they want to build? What questions do they want to be sure to get answered?
Then when they come back from the training, ask them what skills they did build and what questions they did get answered.
Do the same sorts of things with training you go through and with each business book you read. Here's what Making Money Is Not Illegal, Immoral or Fattening has to say about that:
"When you're done reading this book, how will you decide if it's been time well spent? Number one, decide if you know more than you did before. Number two, are you doing things differently? Maybe not a whole bunch of things to start, but at least a few things. Will you do hundreds of things differently? No, you're not. I would never expect you to. I can't. I read an entire book, and I get one, two, three nuggets.
"That's why so few retailers read books on how to improve their businesses. It's because they don't see value in the entire book. Value in the entire book? I read an entire book, and all I want is one good idea because that's all I can deal with. Otherwise, I'm going to forget the rest of the stuff. So please do just a few things differently. Do them well, and that will make the time you've spent reading this book worthwhile.
"But the real test is this: When you take action, at the end of the day, do you make more money? If we can't make you more money, we've wasted your time."
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