The Last Step: Retirement

Incorporating these eight steps into your leadership outlook will prepare you for the last passage of a career: retirement. What constitutes retirement is rapidly changing, but at some point each of us will come to the end of full-time professional involvement and engage in something else. Each time you go through a passage in a conscious, reflective manner, you gain a measure of self-knowledge and maturity. It helps you to know yourself and to understand your values and priorities. As a result, retirement doesn’t become an end point but a passage of its own in the best sense of the word. You are aware of what you value and how to translate it into life after full-time work. Whether you decide to use your skills and knowledge in a volunteer role or travel, or even in a new part-time job, you will make this decision, fully aware of what you want to get out of the remaining years of your life. This is quite different from people who enter retirement with little awareness of their values and beliefs, of what makes life meaningful for them.

We coach many senior executives who have invested their entire life, to that point, in their professional role. They have not developed interests, hobbies, or even strong relationships with significant others because of the demands of their role and the time and commitment they have given to it. They have never separated their identity from their work role, and for them, retirement rebounds them into their early twenties: they must struggle, once again, to determine what interests them, what they want, what they want to pursue, and how they want to spend time. This is a rebuilding challenge that can be avoided by paying attention long before retirement to how you want to spend your time and your life, in addition to your leadership role.