Guest: Beaux Jones, President & CEO, The Water Institute
Host: Lacy Dicharry, Senior Director & Executive Coach, LSU Leadership Development Institute
Published: September 8, 2026
Run time: 38:10
Beaux Jones was Chief of Staff at The Water Institute when his boss and close friend died by suicide.
He talks with Lacy Dicharry about the meeting where he told his team what he was afraid of, why he waited two years before setting a new vision, and what does it look like to be a leader with an open door policy during an emotional transitional period.
This episode discusses suicide and grief. If you are struggling or are seeking support, you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the United States, any time. Support is free and confidential.
Cold Open and Welcome (00:00:00)
What The Water Institute Does (00:01:45)
A Team of Many Disciplines (00:03:36)
How He Stepped Into the Role (00:07:48)
Naming It, and Where to Find Help (00:10:40)
Waiting Before Setting the Vision (00:15:00)
Operationalizing Values (00:19:48)
The Shift From Doing to Empowering (00:26:37)
Vulnerability as a Choice (00:30:22)
Listening, and What Comes With Being Heard (00:34:32)
Close (00:36:30)
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Beaux Jones: When you're really listening, they show up more. When they pound their fist on the desk and say, I have something I need to say in this big meeting, and you're really listening, that's when you learn the value of your team. That's when you learn the value of the communities that you [serve].
Lacy Dicharry: [introduction] Welcome to Teams That Win, a podcast from the Leadership Development Institute at Louisiana State University, where we explore what makes teams win and get to sit down and talk with leaders who help get those teams there. I'm Lacy Dicharry, Senior Director of LDI.
Today on Teams That Win, I am excited to talk to Beaux Jones. He is the President and CEO of The Water Institute in Baton Rouge, an independent research organization working on coastal and environmental challenges. He grew up in Ruston, Louisiana, got his bachelor's degree from Davidson College, and his law degree from our very own [Paul M. Hebert Law Center].
He built his career as an environmental lawyer working in coastal and environmental policy. He came to the Institute as General Counsel, then Chief of Staff, and now serves as the President and CEO, [appointed by the] board in December [2023].
I'm excited to talk to Beaux today because he has been one of the leaders that we have gotten to work with in a deep way, because he's had to lead his team through some hard situations. Things that hopefully most of us will never have to experience.
Leading with vulnerability. How do you step into a role when your predecessor died by suicide? How do you [move through] that as a leader, with the ripple effects of the trauma and the mental health repercussions of that? Leading teams is hard anyway. When we face a hard thing to lead a team through, what does that look like? Beaux and his team have done an incredible job of doing that, so I'm looking forward to you listening today.
Lacy Dicharry: All right, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast today. I am excited to talk to you, because not only have we gotten to do some cool work together, I would love for you to briefly tell us a little bit about the work that you do at The Water Institute. I think a lot of our listeners don't necessarily know what you do for them every day and what you do for Louisiana.
If you want to give a brief overview, tell us about The Water Institute. And how did you go from attorney to CEO?
Beaux Jones: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me, Lacy, and thanks for all the work that we have done together.
I have the privilege of serving an organization called The Water Institute. For those of your listeners who are in the Baton Rouge area, or drive on I-10, we're the big glass and metal building that sticks out over the river on the old municipal dock.
The Water Institute is an independent nonprofit applied research organization, and our mission is to reduce the vulnerability of people, ecosystems, and economies. We do that through deploying transdisciplinary science and planning, and data and technology, to help decision makers with really tough decisions make better decisions in the face of science.
We exist in this [space] that is interesting, in that we are not for profit, but we're not a traditional advocacy NGO. We are independent. We don't take positions left, right, center, up, or down. We work with universities and research labs, but we're not a university academic organization. We work directly with government, but we are not part of the government. And we work with a lot of private sector partners, but we're not the private sector traditionally.
We sit in this space in the middle and really try and pull across those threads to advance community and ecosystem and economic resilience in the face of changing environments. Started here in Louisiana, but we work really from Brownsville up to New York and all the way up the [Mississippi] River, and try and help take the lessons that we learn here in Louisiana and translate them to other places.
Lacy Dicharry: Yeah, I love that. One of the unique things about you all: you sit with and work with a lot of people. You've got a lot of cross-disciplinary teams and focus, and you have to work with a lot of people.
I love how you are structured to really focus on service, but through science. And a lot of people in Louisiana will never know what you do for them. You work on behalf of them every single day. I love the team that you lead.
I want to dig in there. Tell me a little bit about, what is your team like, and what are a couple of the things that you really had to learn quickly to make sure that they were supported?
Beaux Jones: I'll start with kind of the makeup of our team, and then I'll back up and walk into how I ended up in this spot.
Our team is about 85 to 90 people when you include part-time folks. The majority of those are in Louisiana, either here in Baton Rouge, our headquarters, or in New Orleans. And then we have folks elsewhere.
The Water Institute really grew after a lot of investments in coastal and climate resilience that happened to coincide with the COVID timeline. We grew a lot, doubled in size during COVID. But in so doing, we also became this remote hybrid organization, where we have team members in different states, and work in as many states.
It's really interesting, in that we are very much a place based organization. But also the people who work toward those places, coastal and water ecosystems and the communities that are adjacent to them. It's very place specific, but also place [specific] in terms of where we get the expertise and where those lessons can translate to.
Our organization has what you would think of as traditional hard sciences. We have geoscientists and biologists and ecologists and groundwater specialists. On the technology side, we have data engineers and numerical modelers. But then we bring in a huge component of human dimension. We have social scientists and folks that are working in community resilience. We have archaeologists and anthropologists. And lawyers. And we have a team that [cuts] across, and then fantastic administrative professionals, everything from finance to HR.
It's a big team of a lot of different skill sets, but critically, from a leadership standpoint, from a lot of different silos of training and communication styles and communication norms. That's been one of the biggest opportunities for growth, we'll call it. To really think about, how does a lawyer, who [came out of] state government and the courtroom, how do I communicate with a social scientist?
And how do we, not only as an organization, put the ship in a direction that everybody understands and is aligned with and is on board moving in that direction. But then also, what are our norms of communication? How do we show up for one another? How do we receive information? And how do we balance our own processing times and the way that we [take in] information? That's one of the biggest opportunities, and it's a really fun challenge.
Lacy Dicharry: You have one of the most complex teams I've had the chance to work with. It really is, because it's all of these different disciplines that have to come together. They have to learn to communicate with each other. They have to at least know and understand each other enough to speak similar languages. They've got to be able to build trust across all of these disciplines and work with people who don't understand anything of what they do.
There are specialists in communications and different things, and so you have to learn how to be with all of these people, plus the hybrid, plus really advanced intellect and the complexity of the research and the design that you all do. It's layer upon layer of complexity.
Walk me through when you realized, okay, I've taken on this team. There are some things that I know that I need to support them in. And how do I know when I need to ask somebody else who maybe has expertise to come in and help? Walk me through what that was like for you in the beginning.
Beaux Jones: Let's take a step back. I'm an environmental and coastal lawyer. Came out of LSU, went into the team that was helping after the Deepwater Horizon [spill], worked on a lot of state water and coastal environmental policy issues. Then had the opportunity to come over to The Water Institute to serve as General Counsel. And then eventually as Chief of Staff for my predecessor, a guy named [Justin Ehrenwerth], who was a fantastic leader and a dear friend. We worked together for several years.
And then, tragically, about three years ago, Justin passed away from suicide.
Here we are. Myself, and a number of people on the team, considered our leader, our boss, a friend. We had known him for many years, in and out of the organization. There's this very immediate loss. There is the uncertainty of what that means, here in an organization that has a board of directors, governed like any other nonprofit. There's all this uncertainty. It's a very public organization, and so there's all these questions and concerns.
That was what we stepped into. Or what I stepped into. Or not stepping into. I was already there, with a whole team.
You translated that into where we are as an organization, or where we've been as an organization, with all of these different needs and people and skill sets. Something that we've talked a lot about in the past is the [Karpman] drama triangle, of the persecutor, the victim, and the rescuer. There's these cycles that happen in organizations or relationships or teams, and the only way out of them is to own your part and take a step out.
For me as a leader in that moment, number one, as a human, and it was not my [highest] priority to be a leader of a team. I had just lost a best friend. I had my two children, who are best friends with his two children. I had his two children and his wife to care for. And then I had the [rest of the] members of our team, who are all just [in this] reality.
Just like the drama triangle, where the first step out is to just look in and own. I did what I know how to do, and many of us did. My emotions are on my sleeve. I'm a terrible poker player. As soon as we could after everything happened, we just got the whole team together and we sat down and I laid out how I was feeling. I laid out what I was scared about, and encouraged the team, to the extent that they could or wanted to, to do the same.
Not a lot of other people shared. A lot of people didn't have the same background with the information and the proximity to it. But I think it opened a door to just say, look, this is all of our reality now. All I could do is be up front with what I was scared of, what we were dealing with. And then use that as the path out.
Lacy Dicharry: One thing that I appreciate about you is that vulnerability based leadership. Yes, it might not have been how you would have chosen to step into the CEO role. But I do want to take a second here to just name that. I think a lot of people listening have had some experience with a loved one or somebody they know [dying by] suicide. And we're talking about it in the workplace context.
It's a very fine balance, of a leader understanding the impact and the ripple effect that that has for their team. There's grief, there's shock.
And I'm sure with you. My brother died by suicide as well, when he was 23. I personally know what it's like to walk through that type of grief, and it is a unique type of grief that other people may not experience.
If you don't have awareness, September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. It's something we're going to add to the show notes, a lot of resources. There's trainings. A lot of people are afraid to ask a question. If they see these signs in somebody, they're afraid to ask, like, are you thinking of harming yourself? And that's the best thing to do sometimes, to be able to reach out, ask the question, and know what to do if they say yes, and refer.
We're going to be putting additional resources out, because leaders need to know these things.
Beaux Jones: Yeah. I'm by no means an expert in this. I think I'm a reasonable, I was a good lawyer. I think I'm a good friend. And every day [I try to be] a good leader. But there are experts in the space. There is so much knowledge and understanding out there.
I think everybody that we know has been touched in this way. It's a sad and [difficult] situation. There's nothing about it that's [unbelievable]. There's nothing about it that's any different than any other illness, and I think that's important.
But it also adds another layer. It's in an organization. You have to balance, I'm a [person] where everything must [come] out. But in so doing, you also have to recognize that's not everybody. And that pendulum is a hard balance. Because while I may come and spill my grief or my fear or my insecurities on the table, maybe that's not what people are looking for in a leader that day. Maybe they come to work to, look, I want to put my head down, and this is my place of stability. That's hard to [manage] as well.
When somebody loses a family member, there's a lot [of that] in the family. There's this assumed cultural and social and organizational balance where you show your genuine concern, but you also leave space. But then when that loss is in the workplace, I didn't have a checklist on what to do. We all had to [work through it], and sometimes we did it wrong, and sometimes we did it right.
It was also similar, a couple years before, while Justin was still with us, the organization was going, or the world was going through, COVID and unrest and the protests around George Floyd. I remember having very active discussions, like, what is our role here? How do we show up for our team? Or is this the place where we don't, and we just pretend like the world doesn't happen?
That's a really tough balance for an organization. And it's an even tougher balance when you're in an organization where you have so many different backgrounds, both age, geographic, skill set, cultural, regional. That is just all these different layers onto it.
From my standpoint, I'm sure there's notes in a 360 review for me of where I've gotten it wrong, and I look forward to reading those. But all I can do is be as authentic as I can. For the leaders that are watching this, or the growing leaders that are watching this podcast: authenticity is the only thing you've got. I've learned many, many times that trying to be somebody else is generally going to [blow up] in my face. This is all I've got, and it's not perfect. It's not perfect.
Beaux Jones: We worked through and [we're] navigating it. But coming into, or staying in, an organization, and then this opportunity and this responsibility to lead a team through the moment. For me, it's also personally pretty taxing, in that being in this role is invariably my dream job. If you would have told me forty years ago this is what I was going to do, I would do everything to do it. And also, the circumstances in which I got it, I would give everything up to not have.
There's a huge [wrestling] personally that I had to do. But then to come back in that moment: okay, we're through the immediate. Now where do we go? What do we do?
One of the first things that we did is that we commissioned a third party brand audit to say, what do people think about this place? What do people know? What do people not know? Because one thing that we learned in some early listening sessions, getting back to your question about all these different people, is that people hear information different ways. People came to this organization, or to any organization, for different reasons. Some people came, it's a job. Some people because they believe in the mission. Some people came because it was the best opportunity.
How do you hold all those [threads]? And then because it's a mission based nonprofit and we have this outside [profile], what is that? How do people understand it? That was one of the first steps for me, to understand where we all were in this place. And then, for the people that we seek to serve and the communities that we seek to empower with better science and data, what are they expecting from us? We spent a lot of time [wrestling] with, [where] is the world, and what are we walking into? What are the expectations? What is the baggage that we're walking into it with?
Lacy Dicharry: You said a lot of great things there. But consistently we hear authenticity. Consistently we hear humanity. We hear trust. We hear clarity of mission. All of those things are really important for any team in any context, but especially in those higher stakes teams. Those are the things that military and medical and all of those [teams need]. You need authenticity. You need to build trust.
Beaux Jones: I think that's really interesting. Humanity, trust, and then clarity of mission. Those are really interesting pillars.
Because I think in many ways the latter one, the clarity of mission, the clarity of vision, is one of the most critical. Because it then drives the direction that we're all going. It drives the ability to have a transdisciplinary or multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team.
And for us it was the one that we had to kind of wait for. That creates a lot of churn. Because just as an individual, as a person, I didn't feel like, okay, hey, we just had this incredible dramatic event, and now, one eighty, this is what [my] vision is for the future.
Because this was an organization that was started largely by the state of Louisiana and the Baton Rouge community. There's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears as to why it exists, and what it was seeking to accomplish. And I wasn't [brought in] from outside because I was going to turn things in this direction. We're all a part of this together.
For me, it has been painful at times, because as a leader you want to be able to say, on board, here's the charge. And I've largely been a little slow there, and a little delayed in that. That's created a necessary tension, and [some] unnecessary [tension], but it's created a tension and this confusion that we have been riding. Because it just didn't feel like we could jump in and say, here's where we're going.
In hindsight, maybe you would say, here's the strategy that we have now, three years later, and we're going to start there. But now that we have, in that time since, I've had the opportunity to grow into this role. We have a very clear five year strategic plan, that is like a nesting doll, that has a renewed mission and vision with clear strategic priorities, and then detailed initiatives line by line going down into all of our organization. It's so refreshing to have that now.
But those couple years where we were building that, and we were trying to understand where we were to get there. That clarity of vision, that clarity of mission, is so critical, and it makes all the other things [fall] into place.
Lacy Dicharry: Sometimes it does take some time. You've got to get all the right voices in the room, and sometimes it takes some intention and effort to really understand what they're saying and get it right. And sometimes it doesn't happen as quickly as maybe the world expected things to happen. That speed of change is constant.
I want to shift a little bit. One of the things that you also included in your vision, and found really important, was making sure that we clarify the values. Because a lot of people spend a lot of time on the what of the work, and that is very important. And then they focus on, how do we get the work done, the task execution. Not a lot of leaders spend as much time on: how do we work together? What are we agreeing to? What are our shared common values?
Not only do we understand what are the values each individual brings, but what are the agreements that we have about how we're going to work together? That is something that you did. Walk me through that process of what it was like building those values. But then also, how has that made an impact for your team?
Beaux Jones: It's again one of these things where it's been push and pull. We didn't clean the slate and say, brand new plan, everything is on the table.
Our team for ten plus years had been living with a series of core values, and many of them are still there. But what had not really been done, or redone, was to sit with those and say, what do you mean when we say that? Because what we learned is that when a core value is accountability, what that means to me and what that means to you may be completely different things. Transdisciplinary collaboration: what that means to a lawyer who walks into the organization, versus somebody who is a longtime [tenured] researcher who works across transdisciplinary teams, that means something different.
Core values in an organization oftentimes are the posters with the eagle flying that says hope, or commitment. And there's a place for that. Look, I'm a former athlete, and that [rah rah] stuff, it's there, it's awesome, you need it.
But the shared agreement. Some of our core values are kind of how we show up for work. Scientific integrity, transdisciplinary collaboration. That's so important for an independent scientific organization. But then some of them are our agreements between leaders. Accountability. What does that mean? How does that look? And then some of them are related to how we show up as an organization.
One of the first things that we did as we started, [we] prioritized the first core value, which is impact. Which is, what are we doing here? We're not here to do another project. We're not here just to [turn a crank], to create another widget. We're here to have an impact in the world. Through that strategic planning process, we spelled out definitions for those.
How did I pull that together? I could have written it, I guess technically I have the authority to say, I'm going to write this down, and everybody, this is the definition. But the first thing we did is, at a staff retreat, we put a survey to the entire team, seventy five at that time, plus people. What does it mean to you? And how do you think the organization does at it?
And then we really sat, and you were helpful in this, you sat down with our leadership team, and we picked a couple of those core values and we sat with our leadership team and said, what does this mean? What does it look like when you're doing this? What does it look like when we're not?
Whether that's changed the organization for the better, I hope it has. I hope that there's better [alignment], and I think that there is. But it definitely gives me more in the toolbox. Because take accountability, just the concept of accountability. It's hard to have accountability if you don't have a shared agreement before. It's like if you have a contract that says, here, you know, the prescribed damages if you break it.
Lacy Dicharry: Well, you can [enforce] it with a contract.
What I like to say is, we can't hold people accountable to what we don't name. The fancy word is operationalize, but just taking them: what does it mean to you? What is the behavior that looks like when we are in alignment with this value? What is the behavior that looks like when we're not in alignment?
For example, if we operationalize it, for leaders who are listening to this and are like, how do I do this with my team, because people are all over the place: one of the key things for accountability is, I talk about people instead of talking to them. That's out of alignment. And then one of the key things is, I skill up and have hard conversations directly with people when I need to give them feedback.
Very, very simple. Very straightforward. Very easy to see if I'm doing that or not doing that. But unless we name it, we really can't hold ourselves accountable, hold each other accountable.
And with operationalized values, it's much easier to go and say to somebody, hey, we all agreed to these behaviors. Here's how I'm experiencing how you're showing up here. Can we talk about this? Because it's having an impact on my ability to do my work.
Beaux Jones: Yeah. The operationalized values, that's how I came into contact with you. I was on vacation and I was reading Dare to Lead from Brené Brown, and got into the section on operationalizing your values.
I looked at the list. It's like three pages of, here, basically you take every Fortune 500 company or every nonprofit, and you go through, their core values are going to be on that list. And a couple things of ours were. Transdisciplinary collaboration and scientific integrity are [not].
Lacy: All those.
Beaux: A little unicorn on there. But then walking through that process, just this internal of, okay, what do we mean when we say this, and is it important that we have this? Because everybody comes to our organization, to our team, for different reasons. And it's incumbent on me and the leadership team in our organization to then say what it means when we're here.
What are we focusing on? Because we also have ninety plus active projects, and people moving in hundreds of different directions. For any given day, it may be writing this report or doing this field work. So how do we tie that back to the larger why of the organization?
For us as an organization, that's one of the things, going back to the brand audit, that I was faced directly with. We spent the first years of the organization spending a lot of time talking about the nuance of what we do, and then how we did it. Like, oh, we do really good science. And then how we do it, we do it as best we can with other people. Both things are true.
But both things land flat with an external audience, and when you're trying to build a team culture around where we're going. That's when you really have to come back and start with a why. Come back to, why we're doing this. For our organization, having a vision that is, we want to reduce the vulnerability of people, ecosystems, and economies, and the communities across the space where we work. And we envision a world where people and nature thrive alongside each other in a changing world. That is something that we had to zoom out and really think about.
Lacy Dicharry: I love that, and bringing in the people side of it. It's not always about the work of the work. A lot of team leaders, they're great technical leaders. They're great engineers or great medical people. And then once they level up and start managing other people, that's a different skill set. A lot of people really want to get into the work, and I want to help other people with the work. But it's the how of the work, and that's really the job of the leader.
Beaux Jones: Yeah, that's been something I still struggle with to this day. My job as a lawyer was to push as hard as I could, and research, and prepare, and argue to the best of my ability for a very focused issue. And also to only ask questions that I know the answer to, not just go on fishing expeditions.
And then once you step in as a General Counsel, and then as a Chief of Staff in particular, your job is to get things done. Something pops up, something falls through the cracks, go get it done. And that's great. And your job as a leader is to do as well, but it's to empower others to do.
It's not just inspiring one person to be their best self that day. That's part of it. The harder part is, how do you get a team that is working in their individual capacities, a finance professional, an HR professional, a lawyer, an engineer, a data scientist, how do you get them working in their own spaces, [and] get them to pull across their silos and work together?
That's an area where sometimes it's [hard] for me. Because as a leader you also have this vantage point that nobody else has. You get to see everything. And my tendency is, all right, let's jump in and do. Let me jump in. And so then my team would tell me, and tell you, and have told you, I get into the weeds.
And while I may be good at that, and that may be a skill set I have, that's not my job. My job is not to get in and dive into the weeds. That's something that I continue to struggle with. I want to get in there and get it done.
Lacy Dicharry: It's been a pleasure watching you over the last year and a half now. Because I have really seen you take it into account, think about it deliberately, and then make a change. You're significantly shifting how you're showing up with your team, and how you are leading, and how you own your part.
I think it does take a little bit of time as a new leader, particularly a new CEO, to really understand, what does the team need from me? That's not something that you can do from just an easy survey. That takes time.
Beaux Jones: And for me, this is hard for me, and so I say it to myself a lot. There's a great book, Unreasonable Hospitality, by Will Guidara. [He talks about] taking over a new restaurant. He talked about a leader that he used to work [for].
One of the first conversations I have is when I walk in, I said, look, my job is to make this restaurant the best restaurant. My job is not to make you happy. That may seem tough, he said, but the more that you show up [with] your goal that day being to make the best restaurant, most times that's right. When you show up and your goal is to look out for yourself, or extract this one opportunity, then we may be misaligned.
That's hard, because I'm very much a people person. That's my [Enneagram]. I've got a lot of [red], a lot of social. I love people. I want to know how things are landing with them, and I over analyze that.
So I recognize, while my desire may be to please everybody, my job is to do what, in my position with the information that I have, is the best for the organization at that moment. Which may result in people being happy, including myself. It may not.
Lacy Dicharry: I would love to hear a little bit more, because you read Dare to Lead. You were kind of thrown into leading with vulnerability. But I still [see] you continuing to lead with vulnerability by choice, and I'm curious.
Because a lot of people out here are like, I'm not going to be vulnerable at work, that doesn't make sense. But what we know from the research is two things. You can't get to courage without vulnerability, and vulnerability is how you build trust.
And we aren't talking about vulnerable systems. We're not talking about holes in tech and data. What we're talking about is the human side. We're putting armor down, we're showing up fully. It's not disclosing all your personal stuff, that's not vulnerability either. But it is showing up in a way that puts the armor down, makes you a little bit more open with people.
Tell me a little bit about the role vulnerability has played in your transition over the last few years. And what would you say to other leaders that are on the fence about what they think vulnerability means in the workplace?
Beaux Jones: I think it's a challenge, and it's even a challenge for me, because I tend towards [oversharing], putting my cards on the table. I've cried in front of my team, and I'm not embarrassed by it. Does it make me a weaker leader? Do people [think less of me]? But if that throws people off, there's many leaders and many [ways] that could not probably [be a fit] for them.
Part of me has [been] finding the right balance to allow my full self to show. But also, sometimes I'm a lot. I talk a lot. And I'm passionate about what we do. I care about this deeply. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd buy a better pair of binoculars to go see birds and a better bike, but I'd still do the same thing.
Vulnerability for me, going back to sports, which is where many of us learn our first lessons. I can remember at a very early age reading a book from a local Baton Rouge [writer] named Jeff Marx. Jeff wrote a book called Season of Life. Season of Life was this beautiful book about these few football coaches at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Joe Ehrmann and Biff Poggi. They talked about love, and they talked about brotherhood, and they talked about the sensitive side of things, the things that most men go and play sports for. But then they [put] a name [to it].
Lacy Dicharry: They don't want to name it.
Beaux Jones: And so I remember, with that book and getting to know Jeff and getting to know the people in that book, that aligned with who I was and how I am.
And I think for our organization, we're not building industrial pipe fitting, which is a [worthy] effort. We are trying to help communities and ecosystems and economies [get through] some pretty challenging things. Tribal leaders who have generations upon generations on the same soil, who are trying to figure out whether their language and their people will exist in the same space. This is heavy. Community loss and challenge.
If we're going to ask the decision makers that we work with, the state and city [governments], to be vulnerable, to be transparent, to lean into their values and then make tough decisions, it's incumbent upon us as an organization to do that. And then for me as a leader in our organization, I don't know another way. And I hope it's the right way, because I think what we're doing is important.
I know that, given the background that we all have in our organization of loss and trauma, I'm going to open the door and be as vulnerable as possible, and have my [phone] and my proverbial door open as much as possible. Because you never know who's going to talk. You never know what's going to [hit] somebody in the right moment.
I have had leaders that have opened themselves up vulnerably. I have had parents and coaches and friends that have broken with the mold, so to say, and it's been really impactful to me. That's how I've chosen to lead, and it's appropriate for the type of work that we're [doing].
Lacy Dicharry: It's an incredible [approach]. What we talk about a lot is, when leaders are vulnerable, they give other people permission to do the same. And whether they choose to or not, that's okay.
It's been really incredible to watch how you influence your team through vulnerability. Providing that space for people to come and be a whole human in the work that they do. Because it is meaningful, and people want more of that fulfillment and meaning at work. Being able to provide that for a whole organization making a huge impact for the state, and now internationally. It's been a really incredible [thing] to watch with you guys.
Beaux Jones: Thank you. Thank you for the role that you played. And I want to double click on something you said, which is a challenge.
Because people say, oh, it's lonely at the top. And it can be. There are times where you don't have everybody to [wrestle] with. Great that I have a fantastic [board that] lets me ask all kinds of questions and [debate] all kinds of issues.
But what you said, lead with vulnerability, and then you don't get to choose whether people [walk] through the door. And sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's the altar call that people don't show up to, and you [don't know] where that's landing. That's an added layer for leaders. If you're going to put your cards on the table, you're also going to have to recognize that you have a certain privilege to do that.
I'm a loud talking lawyer, white male. Me being vulnerable may be different than people on my team, may be different than people in the community. There's a certain privilege that I bring into the room that I try and check and I try and understand. Most times I'm not going to get the same thing back, which is what I have to remind myself, and I remind myself every day.
Try and listen more, because I can talk, and we can take this podcast on for three hours. But when you're really listening, people's vulnerability [is] the opportunity. People's insights, they show up more. When they pound their fist on the desk and say, I have something I need to say in this big meeting, and you're really listening. That's when you learn the value of your team. That's when you learn the value of the communities that you [serve].
Lacy Dicharry: Well, thank you so much for coming on. It has been such an impactful conversation for me. And I think for our listeners, it's rare to be able to pull back the curtain at that level. I appreciate your vulnerability even here today, but leading with it.
Anything else you want them to know, or anywhere you want them to follow you?
Beaux Jones: Yeah. You can follow along with our work at The Water Institute. It's where I dedicate a lot of my time and my life. And there are another eighty five really skilled and talented and brilliant and dedicated people.
We have a member of our team, we talk about, when you want to [turn] a big ship, you don't crank the rudder first. You [move] the trim tab, and then the trim tab moves the rudder, and then the rudder moves the ship. If our organization is this big ship that's doing really great work, I hope to be a little bit of trim tab on it. But there are so many people that are the engine.
Follow along there. And I would also say, for you and for LDI, pick up the phone and call. There are a lot of skills that I bring to the table. But the language necessary to [work through] what we have been [working through] the last couple [of years], I didn't have until I started asking questions. And I still don't have it fully. It's really important to have people like you there in our corner, and to bring some of the books to life. That's really helpful.
Lacy Dicharry: Thank you. I appreciate that. [There's still] work to do. Thank you so much for coming.
Beaux Jones: Thanks for having me.
Lacy Dicharry: [close] To learn more about the Leadership Development Institute, and how we support leaders in organizations through coaching and facilitation, please visit us at [lsu.edu]/ldi and connect with us at @LSU_LDI on Instagram. Now, geaux lead.