How do you scale high-quality leadership training to hundreds of leaders, especially when they lead radically different teams?
Across dozens of interviews with talent development leaders, this question consistently tops the list as one of the most common challenges.
Hayden Beverage Company, a family owned, Idaho-based beverage distributor, has solved this challenge in a distinctive way. Hayden stands at roughly 625 employees who work in demanding, fast-paced roles across sales, warehouse operations, delivery, corporate leadership, and more. Building a connected culture that drives retention and engagement across all these functions is no small challenge.
Spearheading this work is Anthony Baker, Director of Leadership Development. A former Navy SEAL with 26 years of service and the founder of his own leadership consultancy, Baker joined Hayden Beverage in 2020 and built out their leadership development structure from the ground up. He shared that “this position is unique among beverage distributors and a testament to Hayden’s ongoing investment in our people as a learning organization.” Over the past five-plus years, he has trained and personally coached more than 140 leaders through tight-knit, cross-functional cohorts, building teams of leaders across the company.
Here’s how he did it, and what he learned along the way.
A Leadership Program Designed for On-The-Job Application
Baker has run 16 leadership programs, training more than 140 leaders across the organization—from emerging leaders to directors. Each team is intentionally small, usually eight people, and deliberately cross-functional.
“I’ll put leaders from sales, delivery, warehouse, and the office all in the same room,” Baker explained. “There can be some natural friction and communication gaps between departments. Getting them together helps deepen understanding and build new relationships.”
The structure of the program is consistent but demanding: eight weekly three-hour sessions, with real-world application between each. Baker starts with company values and leadership tenets, then introduces a new leadership topic each week: communication, decision-making, performance management, conflict management, and emotional intelligence. Participants engage in team exercises and role playing during the sessions, then apply what they learned on the job with their teams before returning to debrief at the next session.
“It’s not academic,” Baker said. “Leaders go through the workshop, go try things, then come back and talk about what worked and what didn’t.” This workshop-practice-workshop cadence helps ground the program in application.
Building Empathy Through Job Shadowing
One of the most practical elements of the leadership development program is the job shadowing in between the sessions. Leaders in the cohort all spend time in roles far removed from their own: warehouse managers ride along with sales reps and office staff work alongside delivery teams.
“There are always ‘aha’ moments in these ride-alongs,” Baker said. “People realize how hard each other’s jobs are, and how decisions ripple across the company. And this fundamentally changes how they interact moving forward.”
For example, the sales team might realize the ripple effect of late and last-minute orders on the warehouse and the delivery teams. “People start to learn how the company works and how they fit into the broader organization,” he explained. This interconnectedness establishes earned empathy that can fundamentally change how work gets done at Hayden.
7 Elements of a Great EQ Workshop
Through 16 cohorts, Baker has refined his approach. Here are the seven elements he's found essential:
- Get into specific experiences: Rather than trying to convince people of why they should care about EQ, Baker uses a simple exercise. Participants pair off to discuss moments when they lost their composure at work and share what they learned. Baker shares his own missteps, often drawing parallels to his military leadership roles or what he has learned about the company in his past programs.
- Use an EQ self-assessment: This helps sharpen each leader’s understanding of emotional intelligence by drilling down to specific behaviors that represent strengths and areas for improvement. For example, an assessment might help you identify that when your emotions run high, you tend to lose control of your decision-making.
- Emphasize how EQ can help you make better decisions: One phrase Baker often uses in his programs is facts over feelings. “Feelings matter,” Baker said. “But you can’t let emotions overtake your decision-making.” They delve into how to recognize and understand your emotions, so they don’t derail your decision-making.
- Introduce the idea of “emotion contagion”: Research shows that a leader’s mood acts like a virus, their team members picking up on the emotions of their leader. Baker introduces this idea using the catchphrase “leaders bring the weather.” “If you come in hot, your team feels it immediately,” Baker said. “If you’re calm, that spreads too.”
- Keep a trigger log: In a trigger log, you track each of the situations that trigger you into an emotional reaction. “Awareness is everything,” Baker said. “Once you track your patterns and see them on the page, you can start changing them.”
- Get vulnerable: “Throughout the workshop, I will share times I didn’t handle something well, you know, military stories, work stories, and even some family stories,” Baker said. “If I want the leaders in my class to open up, I have to go first,” he said. “Starting at the top with our CEO, we embrace the importance of vulnerability and humility.”
- Tie it back to at-home examples: Situational Leadership and many other leadership models can only be used in a work environment. EQ, however, is a skillset you can use anywhere. Baker is sure to incorporate examples and reflections that connect to life beyond work. This helps show its value, and it helps make learning stick as people go home and see and practice EQ.
The theme across all of these elements? Emotional intelligence sticks when it’s grounded in real moments—conflict, pressure, decision-making, and emotional spillover across teams.
The Leadership Lesson
For L&D leaders looking to improve cross-functional collaboration, Baker’s approach offers a blueprint. Build small, cross-functional cohorts. Emphasize real-world application between sessions. And use emotional intelligence to help leaders understand how their behavior impacts people outside their own function.
