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I am learning a lot of leadership lessons these days. Mostly having to do with embarking on projects I can sorta kinda get my arms around, but which expand from manageable to giant when poked with a stick. One such is launching a magazine. Which seems like maybe a sensible person would understand was going to be a Really Big Challenge, which I sort of knew, but didn't really know. I'm not, it seems, so very sensible these days.

So the project is plugging along, and I'm learning all kinds of things that aren't surprising, but aren't easy, either. Like: When launching a flagship publication, you'll have to make design decisions, for which it would be good if your visual brand was articulated somewhere (ours wasn't, so we had a diversion while we created a graphical style guide).

And governance decisions (who will decide the editorial tone of the thing, anyway? How much power should we give the volunteers? And how much should we keep? Before inviting them, we need to define their roles.)

And business decisions (What's a reasonable percentage to give your ad sales vendor? if they take away your online classified section headaches, is that worth an extra 5%?)

All that is totally aside from the part I expected to be the hardest: creating a concept for the magazine, and an editorial calendar, and finding a cadre of writers and giving them assignments (We must first figure out author agreements that are fair to the publication and the [unpaid] authors).

So as my anxiety rose, I decided to do something a little risky: ask the whole staff to volunteer to sit around a table and thrash some things out - I literally just needed someone else to help make decisions.

So I stood up with my flip chart and outlined the work, and said: "There's more to be done than I can or should do on my own. And there's stuff I need help thinking through. I need other heads around these questions. I need volunteers."

And was greeted with silence. Stony silence.

So I sat down - I knew I had a couple of allies out there I could rope in (they weren't at the meeting), so maybe I'd made a doofus of myself, but really I was no worse off with workload. The agenda moved on, and at the end of the lunch something great happened. People stood up, walked over and put their names down to help --almost half the staff volunteered.

What was really great, though, was this: a colleague pulled me aside and said "That was very brave, to ask for help like that. People don't ask for help here. If you don't get enough help, it's because it's not the culture yet. I'm glad it's changing." Another wrote to tell me she liked my 'I don't know everything so let's work it out together' approach.

Asking for help is a lesson from waiting tables. When you're so busy you can't catch up, you've got to be able to stop and articulate what you need. I gained allies because I admitted the job was too big for just me. And the decisions got made, the work is getting done. And everyone who helped has a stake now. That's my favorite part.