The ALOHA reboot: seven minutes to close the gap

Hi Reader! Daria’s here.

For most of my career, I pushed through. Whatever it cost.

Merging 500 people in an M&A that closed in a few months. A full restructure. A major telecom rebrand. I got it done. Every time.

And then I’d get sick.

It took me years to realize that most things don’t fail during a crisis. They fail after it.

We brace for the disruption, push through it, then treat the recovery as automatic. It isn’t. Decision quality drifts. Alignment loosens. And because the emergency is officially over, no one owns the recalibration.

My guest, Savio Clemente, calls it the post-crisis leadership gap. Left alone, he says, “it drifts, and then it shifts, and then it gets wider. It becomes a big chasm.”

If I had to take one line from the whole conversation, it’s this: “Performance doesn’t fail first. Clarity does.”

We treat recovery as bouncing back: returning to who we were before. But after real disruption, there’s nothing to bounce back to. Savio knows this better than most, as a two-time cancer survivor who studied his own recovery like a subject. “It was never about climbing the summit,” he told me. “It was always about who I became as I was climbing.” He also noticed, across 29 days in a hospital, that the patients who rushed to get discharged kept coming back because of an infection or a complication. Recovery takes courage because, from the outside, it looks like nothing is happening.

So he built a small practice for this exact window.

The ALOHA Reboot

Aloha means hello — a hello to your inner self. Seven minutes, five moves.

A — Acknowledge what you’re carrying. Before you fix anything, name it. The quarter was brutal. The reorg cost something. Say it to yourself first. Naming creates distance, and distance gives you room to think. “Distance creates a little buffer between me and the situation,” Savio says. You can’t recalibrate what you won’t admit has shifted.

L — Listen for the feeling, not the situation. When you or someone on your team freezes on “I’ve never dealt with this before,” reach past the situation to the feeling underneath it. “Track back to a time in your life,” he says, “not when you’ve experienced the same situation, but when you’ve experienced the same feeling. How did you resource that?” The situation is new. The feeling rarely is — and that’s where your resourcefulness already lives.

O — Open to the hard thing instead of bracing against it. The instinct after disruption is to resist whatever’s been imposed — the new system, the restructure, the pace. Opening means reframing it. Savio did this in the extreme, choosing to see his chemo “not as poison, but as an elixir.” His challenge to leaders who tell him the work is soul-sucking: “Why can’t it be soul searching?” What you resist runs you. What you reframe, you can work with.

H — Harness what you need, out loud. Recovery runs on fuel, and most leaders never ask for it. We build a facade of having every answer, then wonder why we’re empty. Name the support you need, and ask your team for theirs. “If we don’t tell people our needs,” he says, “they’re not going to figure it out for themselves.”

A — Act small. Insight is the easy part. Acting is where the gap begins to close — and it doesn’t take much. The whole practice is seven minutes. When one executive told Savio he didn’t have seven, Savio shrank it: one minute a day, five days. “It’s not that people don’t want to change,” he says. “They just don’t have the tools.” Start with the minute you have.

The whole thing is for you first — and then for everyone watching how you carry it. Your dysregulation is contagious; if you don’t recalibrate, it goes off-key for the whole team. Seven minutes against a widening chasm is a good trade.

The crisis is the part everyone remembers. But you don’t win or lose there. You win or lose in what comes after — when the fire’s out, the pressure’s still on, and no one’s checking whether you truly recovered or just kept moving.

My full conversation with Savio is out now on Built by People Leaders. His story — two rounds of cancer, a transplant, and a way of leading that came out of all of it — is one of the most honest I’ve had on the show. Go give it a listen.

See you next week.

Daria

P.S. If a name came to mind while you were reading — a leader you know who’s still catching their breath after a hard season — forward this their way. Sometimes the most useful thing is knowing the gap has a name.