The strength Cera mistook for weakness

A story about asking for help, building your crew, and the myth of the self-sufficient leader

It was a Thursday evening, and Cera Day was still at her desk.

This was not unusual. What was unusual was that she wasn't getting anything done. She wasn't focused. She had a dozen tabs open and bounced from email to email, unable to read any of them thoroughly. Her inbox had 47 unread messages. Her notebook had three different to-do lists, each started on a different day, none of them finished.

She was leading the operations restructure, fielding questions from the executive team, managing a team of 12 who were at various stages of grief about the change, coordinating with IT on the systems migration, and doing it all in the margins of her actual job.

She hadn't asked anyone for help.

Not because she didn't need it. Because it hadn't occurred to her that she could.

Athena found her there at half past 6. She pulled up a chair without being invited, looked at the desk, looked at Cera, and said nothing for a moment.

"Who's in your crew?," she asked finally.

Cera frowned. "My crew?"

"The people you can call on. Your paid and informal advisors. The subject matter experts who can answer the detailed questions. Your peers who are navigating something similar right now."

Cera opened her mouth, then closed it. She thought about it genuinely. "Well, for one, my boss, I suppose. But she's stretched. And I don't want to —"

"Don't want to what?"

A pause. "Seem like I can't handle it."

Athena nodded slowly, as though this was exactly what she'd expected to hear. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

"Can I tell you something about heroes?"

In every story worth telling, Athena said, the hero asks for help.

Not because they're weak. Because they're paying attention. Because they understand that the thing they're trying to do is bigger than one person. Frodo had Sam. Luke had Yoda, Han Solo, Leia, Obi Won, and a bunch of others. Hermione had everyone, really, because she was smart enough to know she couldn't do it alone.

The leaders who come out the other side of hard change with their teams intact — and their own sanity — are the ones who figured out early that going it alone isn't noble. It's just slow, and eventually it's damaging.

"There's this myth,"* Athena said, "That asking for help signals incompetence. That the right leader should have all the answers, all the stamina, all the judgment. But that's not what I've seen in 15 years of this work. What I've seen is that leaders who don't build a crew either burn out or make preventable mistakes. Often both."

Cera was quiet for a moment. "I don't actually know who I'd ask."

"Then that's tonight's work," Athena said. "Not the emails."

They stayed another hour.

Athena drew three circles on the back of a meeting agenda.

• One for advisors: the outside consultants who'd done this dozens of times. The people she could pay to get help, and those who'd be willing to have a few ongoing discussions in light of their past work together.
• One for subject matter experts: the people who knew things Cera didn't: the systems, the psychology, the legal implications, the things that could blindside her if she didn't have someone in her corner who'd already been there.
• And one for peers: the colleagues going through their own version of the same kind of change, the ones who got it in their bones because they were living it too.

"Now name one person for each circle," Athena said.

Cera looked at the page. She thought about her former manager, three roles ago, who'd led a restructure twice the size of the effort Cera was currently leading. She thought about the HR director she'd always liked but never actually called. She thought about a peer at a different company she'd met at a conference two years ago and stayed connected to on LinkedIn, but hadn't spoken to properly since.

"I know people," she said slowly. "I just never thought of them as mine to use."

"They're not yours to use," Athena said. "They're yours to be in relationship with. There's a difference. You're not extracting. You're building something that goes both ways."

Cera sent three messages that night. Short ones, just: I'm navigating something complex at the moment, and I'd value your perspective. Would you have thirty minutes?

All three replied within a day.

The advisor gave her a framework she'd been missing. The subject matter expert caught a compliance risk in the systems plan that would have cost weeks to untangle later. The peer said, over a video call that ran forty minutes over: "Oh, yes, I'm in the same thing. I've been trying to figure out who to talk to about it."

Nobody thought less of her for asking. Several thought more of her. And Cera, for the first time in three weeks, drove home before dark.

A note from the author

There's a particular loneliness in leading change, and most leaders carry it silently, convinced that needing support means they shouldn't have been given the role in the first place. It's one of the most damaging stories we tell ourselves in organizations.

The Build Your Crew map in the Inspired by Fear reader toolkit walks you through exactly what Cera and Athena did that Thursday evening in identifying the people to ask for help, the questions you want to ask, and how often you'll need their input.

You already know people. This exercise helps you see them differently.

Pick up Inspired by Fear: Becoming a Courageous Change Leader. to read more from Cera Day and Athena as they become illustrative examples of what courageous change leadership looks like.