Why New Managers Over Explain (And How To Stop)
Updated: 5 days ago
You made the decision on Tuesday. You explained it in the meeting. You explained it again, (slightly differently), in the follow-up message. On Thursday you found yourself explaining it a third time to someone who had already accepted it on Tuesday and now looks faintly concerned that you keep bringing it up.
This is one of the most common patterns in new management, and almost nobody names it, because it doesn't look like a problem. It looks like being thorough. Being transparent. Bringing people along. All of which sound like virtues, which is precisely why it goes unchallenged for months.
But it usually isn't a communication problem. It's an anxiety one, and the distinction matters, because communication advice won't fix it.
What over explaining actually looks like
It shows up in fairly specific ways, and you'll probably recognise at least two of these.
Justifying a decision that has already been made and already been accepted
Pre-emptively answering objections that nobody has raised, and in doing so introducing objections nobody had thought of
Hedging: "I was just thinking that maybe we could possibly look at" instead of "we're doing this"
Preparing for a routine fortnightly catch-up as though it were a board presentation
Announcing a decision as though it were a question, so nobody is sure whether they're being told or consulted
The tell is the third explanation. The first is communication. The second is clarification. The third is reassurance, and the person being reassured is you.
Why it happens, and why it isn't a character flaw
Two things are usually going on, and neither of them is about your communication skills.
The first is structural. Research by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) with YouGov, covering more than 4,500 UK workers and managers, found that 82% of people who move into management have had no formal management or leadership training at all. CMI calls them accidental managers, and the phrase is doing a lot of work: promoted for being excellent at the job, then expected to do a completely different job without anyone teaching them how. The same research found only 27% of workers describe their manager as highly effective, and that one in three people have left a job because of bad management or a negative culture. If you feel underprepared, that's because statistically you almost certainly are, and so is nearly everyone else in your position.
The second is psychological, and it has a name. In 1978 the psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes described what they called the impostor phenomenon: the inability to internalise your own success, and the persistent sense that you'll shortly be found out. It isn't a clinical diagnosis and never has been, and prevalence estimates vary enormously depending on who's being measured, though the commonly cited figure is that up to 70% of people experience it at some point. What matters more than the number is Imes's specific finding that it shows up most in people beginning something new. Which is, precisely, you.
The mechanism is a loop. A new situation arrives, anxiety spikes, and you manage that anxiety by over-preparing. You deliver. It goes fine. You attribute the fine outcome to the over-preparation rather than to your competence, and so next time you over-prepare again, slightly more. Over-explaining lives in that loop. The extra explanation isn't there because your team needs it. It's there because the silence afterwards is unbearable.
Why it backfires
Here's the genuinely unfair part. Over-explaining undermines exactly the thing it's trying to protect.
When you justify a decision at length, you signal that the decision is still open. People take you at your word. They start negotiating something you thought was settled, and you find yourself defending ground you didn't know you were standing on. The thoroughness reads as uncertainty rather than consideration, and the authority you were carefully building quietly leaks out of the room.
There's a second cost that's harder to see. If every decision arrives wrapped in four reasons and a pre-emptive defence, your team stops being able to tell which decisions are genuinely important. Everything is delivered at the same pitch. When something really does matter, you have no volume left to reach for.
How to stop doing it
None of this is difficult to understand. It's difficult to do, particularly in the moment when the silence lands and every instinct tells you to fill it.
Decide whether you're informing or asking, before you open your mouth. These are completely different sentences and most over-explaining happens when someone is trying to do both at once. "We're moving the deadline to the 14th" is informing. "Would moving the deadline to the 14th cause problems for anyone?" is asking. Pick one. The blurred middle version, the one that informs while sounding like it's asking, is the one that generates the most confusion.
Give one reason, not four. Stacking reasons feels more rigorous and reads as pleading. Pick the single strongest one and stop. If someone wants the other three they will ask, and answering a question is a completely different act from volunteering a defence.
Cut the hedge. "I was thinking we might possibly want to consider updating the process" is the same decision as "we're updating the process," delivered with about a tenth of the authority. Hedging has a legitimate use when you genuinely are uncertain. Applied to a decision you've already made, it just makes people wonder whether you have.
Practise "I don't know yet" as a complete sentence. No trailing explanation, no apology, no promise to have it sorted by Friday unless you actually will. This is the hardest one on the list and by some distance the most valuable, because it's the thing that proves you're not bluffing. A manager who can say it is considerably more trustworthy than one who always has an answer.
Let the silence sit. After you've said the thing, stop. Three seconds of quiet feels like a small eternity when you're the one who just spoke, and it feels like completely normal conversational spacing to everybody else in the room.
If it's your manager doing it
This one is less discussed, and it's genuinely awkward, because the behaviour is well-intentioned and pointing it out badly can read as insubordination.
Start by working out which version you're dealing with. A manager who over-explains because they're anxious needs something quite different from one who genuinely hasn't decided and is thinking out loud at you. The second is actually more common than people assume, and it's worth checking rather than guessing.
The most useful move is simply to ask the clarifying question directly, without making it about them: "Just so I'm clear, is this decided, or are you still weighing it up?" It's a completely reasonable question, it takes four seconds, and it gives them permission to say either. Over time it also quietly trains the pattern out, because they learn you'll ask rather than sit there parsing their tone for hidden meaning.
You can also close the loop deliberately. Confirming back what you've understood and what you're going to do next gives an anxious manager the reassurance they were fishing for, and removes the reason for explanation number three. It costs you one sentence and saves you a meeting.
What doesn't work is going quiet and hoping it stops, or mirroring it back with over-long updates of your own. Both feed the loop. And if it's genuinely affecting how the team works, that's a conversation worth having properly rather than managing around indefinitely.
Where coaching fits
This is exactly the territory Business Coaching is built for, and it's worth saying why. The fix isn't information. You could read this article, agree with every word, and still find yourself explaining the same decision three times next Tuesday, because the gap between knowing and doing is where the actual work lives. What helps is having somewhere to take the specific version of it: the meeting you're dreading on Thursday, the person on your team whose silence you can't read, the decision you keep re-opening. That's not a framework problem. It's a practice one.
Frequently asked questions
Isn't over-explaining just being transparent?
Transparency is telling people the reasoning once, clearly, including the parts that are inconvenient. Over-explaining is telling them repeatedly because you're uncomfortable. The difference is usually who the explanation is serving. If you feel calmer afterwards and they don't know anything new, it wasn't transparency.
What if my team actually does need more context?
Some teams genuinely do, particularly after a period of poor communication, and the fix there is a deliberate one: more context, delivered once, in a format people can return to. That's different from the same decision resurfacing in three separate conversations. If you're not sure which you're doing, ask them. They'll know.
Does this ever fully go away?
It tends to quieten rather than vanish, and it reliably comes back whenever you step up again. Most people find it gets much more manageable once they can spot it happening in real time, which is the point of naming it at all.
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