Posts by Michael Patrick

Persistence is a key to learning and having fun with math.  Research shows that most Americans when presented with a puzzle or problem that’s even moderately difficult will give up trying to solve it within a minute or less.  Being persistent is essential to developing good solutions and ideas or even brainstorming effectiveness. I blame…

The book, Developing Talent for Organizational Results, has a wide range of exercises, insights, and research provided by many of the ISA’s most experienced and proven learning providers.  Now, in one place, you can get quick access to this information.  MOHR Retail contributed a chapter on “Reinforcement: Making Great Training Pay Off!” (starts on pg 415).…

ISA was started 35 years ago when formal training and development companies were few and far between.  The new ‘training’ industry was just forming and it took leaders with tremendous courage and insight to recognize that even competitors could learn something from each other.  At this year’s annual conference we had the pleasure of reconnecting…

If you made a list of challenges and likes about your job in retail you’d probably find that the things that made you crazy, e.g., changing priorities, limited resources, multiple goals, would actually be on the other side of why you liked the job, e.g., never dull, always interesting, a new challenge every day, forced you…

Not all of our retail clients choose to do more than our classroom training.  While our programs are practical, industry-focused, skills-based programs that drive results sometimes the effort stops with the session. This retailer was different.  They typically used their national meetings as a stage for all the Home Office departments to come in and do a…

One of our core Communication Skills is Shape Performance with Reinforcement.  There are several techniques we cover when teaching this skill to District Managers or Store Managers.  I happened to have a more diverse group today that included Regional Presentation Managers, L&D, and some DMs. We were talking about how we sometimes reinforce behavior or…

We pride ourselves as a company on continuous improvement and enhancement.  That’s why we have engaged the expertise of Janet Schatzman & Company, a leading graphic arts studio and consulting firm.  Schatzman and Co have attended RSL training and have begun to reshape the overall ‘look’ of RSL to reflect a more contemporary vision for…

We’ve been working with a major national retailer whose execs do get involved.  Now not all of them are always focused champions and yet bar none they exceed every retailer we’ve worked with in terms of visible senior management support for training. As an example, I was cc’d on a simple invitation that a client sent…

A retail client of ours, one with a national presence, was asking about our work with associate performance and how to move them from being just friendly to being real salespeople.  Now we both agreed that at some point we would need to talk about what the senior leadership vision is around service and selling and…