Why Your Team Keeps Reverting to Old Habits
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Expand Your Leadership Skills.
Explain the Why: The Reason Your Team Keeps Reverting to Old Habits
When teams revert to old habits, leaders often assume the problem is resistance, disengagement, or a lack of accountability. In reality, the issue is usually much simpler and far more fixable. When leaders fail to clearly explain the why, people default to familiar behaviors, even when those behaviors no longer serve the organization. Without context, change feels optional, temporary, or confusing.
At Revela, we believe leadership communication should create clarity, connection, and confidence, not just compliance. On this episode of The Leadership Hustle podcast, Andrea Fredrickson and Michelle Hill discussed why the word why is not a tactical explanation or a leadership buzzword, but a critical driver of employee engagement, company culture, and decision making at work.
Why You Must Explain the Why
Many leaders believe they explain the why regularly. In practice, what they often explain is the what. They outline goals, assign tasks, and share timelines, but skip the deeper story behind why something matters now.
As Hill explained, “The why is the story behind why we need it. It’s the purpose. It’s the bigger purpose.” That distinction matters. When leaders skip the story and jump straight to execution, employees may comply, but they rarely commit. Without understanding why something is important, people revert to existing processes and habits because those feel safer and more efficient.
This breakdown in leadership communication doesn’t just slow progress, it erodes workplace clarity. Over time, teams stop asking questions, stop taking initiative, and stop thinking beyond the immediate task in front of them.
Decision Making at Work
One of the most overlooked benefits of explaining the why is better decision making at work. When people understand context, they don’t have to wait for instructions. They can prioritize, problem-solve, and take initiative because they understand the bigger picture.
Without the why, employees become order takers. With it, they become thinkers. If leaders want teams that anticipate issues instead of reacting to them, explaining context must become a consistent habit, not something reserved for major announcements.
Employee Engagement and Company Culture
Engagement doesn’t come from perks, slogans, or quarterly surveys. It comes from feeling informed, trusted, and included. Hill challenged a common contradiction leaders fall into: “People say we want an engaged workforce. Well, do you?”
Employee Engagement requires leaders to do the work of communication by slowing down, sharing context, and inviting understanding. When leaders consistently provide explanations, they demonstrate respect for their teams’ intelligence and autonomy. Over time, this practice strengthens company culture by reinforcing shared purpose and reducing unnecessary friction.
Why Teams Revert to Old Habits Without Context
Change requires people to act differently. Acting differently requires understanding why the change exists in the first place.
Hill shared an example of a cross-functional team brought together to move information to clients more quickly. Fredrickson summarized the problem, stating, “If we don’t explain to them why they’re coming together, why it’s important, they’re probably not going to be doing anything different.” Without context on what’s changing, who it impacts, and what risk the change is reducing:
Teams rely on old processes
Decision making at work slows down
Initiative drops
Leaders become frustrated
People don’t resist change because they’re difficult. They resist change because they don’t have enough information to justify changing how they work.
Explaining the Why vs. Stating the Goal
One of the most common leadership mistakes is confusing the goal with the why. Saying what needs to happen is not the same as explaining why it matters. Goals describe outcomes, but the why provides meaning. Without that meaning, goals feel transactional and easy to deprioritize when pressure or competing demands show up.
For example, “We need to get information out faster” is a goal. It tells people what success looks like, but it doesn’t tell them why that success matters. Explaining that rapid changes require faster communication to protect client trust, reduce confusion, and help people respond appropriately creates context. That context helps employees understand not just what to do, but how to think about the work.
When leaders explain, they give people a framework for decision making at work. Instead of waiting for direction, employees can assess situations, adjust priorities, and act in alignment with the larger purpose. The why answers questions employees are already asking internally:
Why is this urgent?
Why does this matter now?
Why should I do this differently than before?
When leaders leave those questions unanswered, employees fill in the gaps themselves, often with assumptions that slow progress or dilute results. Explanations remove that guesswork and replace it with clarity, confidence, and alignment.
The Emotional Component of the Why
The most effective explanations are not purely logical. They’re human. Fredrickson reflected on how mission statements often miss the mark, stating, “There’s no emotional attachment. There’s just a bunch of tactical things.”
People don’t engage with efficiency statements. They engage with purpose. When leaders explain how work serves clients, protects teams, or improves outcomes, employees connect their effort to something meaningful. That emotional connection fuels:
Employee engagement
Better collaboration
Higher accountability
Stronger company culture
Providing context is not about overexplaining. It’s about giving people enough meaning to act differently with confidence.
Leadership Communication Is About the Audience
A powerful moment in the conversation surfaced when a common leadership mindset came up: “That’s just not how I’m wired.” It’s a phrase many leaders use to justify a communication style that works for them, but not necessarily for their teams.
Hill explained that leadership isn’t about communicating in the way that feels most comfortable or efficient to the person in charge. It’s about understanding what others need in order to perform well and making intentional choices to meet them there.
Effective leadership communication prioritizes the audience. It ensures people have enough context to understand expectations, make decisions, and take initiative. Leaders who rely solely on bottom-line direction may feel they’re being efficient, but when teams lack context, the result is often hesitation, rework, or resistance.
As Fredrickson pointed out, leaders don’t get the results they want when they withhold the full picture. Without the complete story, teams can’t align their actions with the intended outcome no matter how capable or motivated they are.
Explaining the Why Is a Leadership Choice
Leadership isn’t about comfort. It’s about responsibility. Leaders who choose not to adapt their communication style are choosing not to meet their teams where they are. Explaining the why is one of the clearest signals of intentional team leadership. It tells people their understanding matters, not just their output.
The Cost of Skipping the Why
Many leaders claim they don’t have time to explain. Ironically, skipping it often creates more work later. Fredrickson addressed this tradeoff bluntly, saying, “People say, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ Alright, you get the result you get.” When leaders don’t explain:
Resistance increases
Rework becomes common
Follow-up escalates
Engagement drops
Turning Context Into Clarity
Teams don’t revert to old habits because they don’t care. They revert because they don’t have enough context to sustain new behaviors. When leaders consistently explain the why, they create workplace clarity, strengthen leadership communication, and enable better decision making at work. Over time, this practice increases employee engagement, supports stronger team leadership, and reinforces a company culture that can actually sustain change.
At Revela, we believe leadership is about creating understanding, not just giving direction. If you’d like to learn more about how you can change your leadership behaviors and apply them, listen to the rest of The Leadership Hustle podcast!
About the Hosts
Andrea Fredrickson
Andrea Fredrickson is a thought leader and consultant at Revela, an organization based in Omaha, Nebraska specializing in the development of leaders, culture alignment, and business strategy for private and family businesses of all sizes. Revela is one of the region's most experienced thought challengers, helping individuals and companies find their greatness. Andrea has built an amazing team by believing that fundamentally people want to be successful and become better versions of themselves.
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Andrea has degrees in education, management, and business. She is the author of Insight Unseen; How to lead with 20/20 business vision. She helps people see things differently, self-reflect, and never stop looking for ways to improve themselves on a personal and professional level. Andrea has spent more than 30 years researching and developing methods to help people communicate and lead more effectively.
When Andrea isn’t working with clients, you’ll find her spending time with her family & friends and making memories by exploring new cities.
Michelle Hill
Michelle Hill is a master facilitator and coach at Revela, an organization specializing in the development of leaders and aligning the culture of privately held and family businesses of all sizes. Revela is one of the region's most experienced thought challengers, helping individuals and companies find their greatness.
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An ambitious leader, Michelle has the natural ability to create forward momentum to build teams and get results. She inspires others to look within themselves and to challenge the status quo. She helps create high-performing environments. Michelle brings a diverse background: operations, employee development, and sales in the steel, hospitality, and consulting industries.
Outside of work, you will see her competitive side engaged in her daughter’s sports and ISU athletics. She loves life, her four-legged companions, and captures all the moments through her camera’s lens.
TRANSCRIPT
Andrea Fredrickson:In this episode of The Leadership Hustle, we are going to talk about how we make leadership way too complicated and how we can simplify it. Welcome to The Leadership Hustle, the podcast for executives whose companies are growing fast and need leaders who are ready.
Hi there, and welcome back to this episode of The Leadership Hustle. I’m Andrea Frederickson, and I’m joined by Michelle Hill.
Michelle Hill:
Hi, everyone.
Andrea:
Lately, we’ve been working on a lot of different frameworks, taking things we already know to be true and organizing them into more structure.
Michelle:
Blueprints.
Andrea:
Yes, blueprints. Putting those blueprints together.A couple of weeks ago, I was working with a second level leadership group. These were not senior executives or directors. They were first line managers. We had already gone through seven of nine sessions together. We had covered delegation, motivation, time management, and many of the general leadership topics we talk about, including emotional intelligence.
At the beginning of one of the classes, I asked them a question. I said, “What are the things leaders must do to be most effective with the people they lead?” I broke them into small groups and had them brainstorm. They came back with long lists. Leaders need to listen well. They need to be honest. They need to be available. They need to have good attitudes. All good things. Really good things.
And I said, “At least you’re hearing this somewhere,” because they were doing great work. But then I reminded them, “What have I told you all along? There are really only three things I care about.” We’ve had nine sessions together, so at that point they looked at me like, “Okay, that’s fair.” Then I said, “What if there are only three things? What if there are three priorities, or three buckets?” And that’s where the conversation really started.