Why Repairing a Damaged Culture Takes Longer Than You Expect

Announcements:

In case you didn’t see, I released the first new guest interview of 2026 for the Win More, Live Better podcast!

My first guest of the new year is Jack Mullaney (Head Coach for the HOKA NAZ Elite).

In addition to tuning into these episodes on Apple/Spotify and following along on social media, you can also watch all the recordings of my guest interviews with my new YouTube playlist here.

Lastly, stay tuned for a couple of other special announcements coming this Wednesday (2/4). Excited to share some other things I’ve been building behind the scenes.

The Past Has a Longer Reach Than We Think

Imagine this scenario. You just had a tough conversation, maybe with a player, a colleague, or your spouse. The conversation ends and you try to carry on with the rest of your day, but can’t seem to get over it.

Your body is still tense. You’re quieter. You find yourself purposefully distancing yourself from others and your patience is thinner than usual.

The difficult conversation is over, but your body didn’t get the memo.

This experience is a version of what physicists call hysteresis. Hysteresis is a concept that describes how a system’s current state is shaped not just by what’s happening now, but by what happened before. In essence, the system has a memory and residue remains even after the original cause is gone.

Another way to look at it is like walking on wet sand at the beach. The wave rolls in and recedes, but your footprint is still faintly there. The tide has moved on, yet the imprint remains. That’s hysteresis.

Now I’m not a physics expert to say the least (it was my worst grade over the course of my high school years!), but I think this concept matters a lot more to us than we may realize.

As human beings, many of our reactions, habits, and behaviors aren’t responses to the present moment, they’re echoes of the past.

When New Leaders Inherit Old Scars

This idea re-emerged in a recent coaching call I had with a college volleyball head coach who just completed his first season leading a new program.

He was candid about some of his lingering frustrations. Certain standards took longer to install than he expected. He acknowledged how trust felt slower to develop with some athletes. On top of all this, he noticed clashing and friction between the newly recruited players in the program and those that were influenced by the previous coaching staff.

At first glance, it would’ve been easy to frame this as a buy-in issue or a cultural gap, but there was a point in our conversation where it seemed apparent that there was some lingering scars.

The program and players weren’t just responding to him, they were still reacting to what (and who) came before.

We discussed how some of the resistance was rooted in a lack of integrity amongst the previous coaching regime who were guilty of making a lot of promises to players and not always backing them up. Or there would be a noticeable gap between their words and actions (aka their “audio didn’t match their video”). It was as if returners were still “healing” amidst the turnover. It cultivated a set of experiences that taught them to protect themselves and to not trust words until actions proved otherwise.

Meanwhile, the new class (without that history) moved and adjusted faster. They hadn’t lived through the old system. They weren’t carrying the same emotional residue.

This is hysteresis in human systems.

When you take over a team, you don’t just inherit personnel, habits, and systems, you inherit the “memory” for who you’re serving. And if you don’t account for that, you might misinterpret the reactions and responses you’re getting in real time.

Understanding hysteresis reminds leaders that progress doesn’t always stall because of poor leadership. Sometimes the delay is because the system is still letting go of what hurt it before.

Clearing Space Before Building Forward

If you’re taking over a new team or organization, assume there is residue, even if no one is openly talking about it. One of the most helpful things you can do is deliberately create space to uncover what your people are still carrying.

When I stepped into my role building the mental performance department with the Arizona Diamondbacks, one of the most valuable things we did in year one had nothing to do with programming or creating resources.

During Spring Training, we brought every player in small groups and simply asked about their past experiences with mental skills and previous practitioners. What worked? What didn’t? What left a bad taste? What did they do that you appreciated What created skepticism?

That space did two things:

1. It helped us design a program that actually met their needs.

2. It helped us avoid landmines as we progressed forward because we had taken the time to surface lingering tension, resistance, and dissatisfaction.

We weren’t trying to rebuke their past experiences, but we were trying to understand them.

When you name the residue, you reduce its power.

Final Thoughts

Hysteresis reminds us that human systems have memory. The pressure or cause may be gone, but that doesn’t mean the system is clean.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to move forward is ensure you take the time to clear what’s still holding you back.

The most powerful move isn’t just action toward something new, it’s the release of something old.