McDonald's does (or used to?) the same, requiring corporate managers to work in a restaurant at several points in their careers.
I believe every franchisee is required to attend Hamburger U. There are a number of corporate-owned stores in the area where the a lot of the staff is white-collar professionals in training. Those stores are always amazing.
In general stores in the Chicagoland region are way better than stores elsewhere, and I think part of this is due to the fact that corporate sends managers around for training here. I didn't understand the "mcflurry machine is broken" meme until I took a road trip. I had a number of horrible experiences, including a 20 minute wait for a mcflurry that ended up having more ice cream on the outside of the cup than the inside.
I used to work at the corporate headquarters of a company that owns several chain restaurants. The cafeteria there didn't have any of the chain food dishes, but was very high quality as far as office cafeterias go. They had a test kitchen there also and sometimes they'd give out free meals of the stuff they were testing.
Source: work for McDonald’s head office.