Managing Yourself The Challenges of Retiring from a High-Powered Job - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN

 Managing Yourself

The Challenges of Retiring from a High-Powered Job - Sun and Planets Spirituality AYINRIN 

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Summary.   

Each year, thousands of executives retire from long and successful corporate careers. But few are prepared for the journey they are about to embark on. Based on conversations with dozens of highly respected former chief executives, the authors identified seven common mistakes, ranging from not preparing far enough in advance to thinking you can rely on your existing professional network to not realizing that behaviors that worked for you as an executive can work against you in retirement.

It was mid-summer 2020, and Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM, had six months remaining on her nearly 40-year career with the company. Her longtime mentor, the revered former CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, had reached out to request a meeting. “He wanted to see how my retirement planning was coming along. Truth be told, I hadn’t begun to think about it. I was still running the company full time and had not been able to set aside the time,” Rometty told us.

Rometty arrived at Gerstner’s offices in New York. Not wanting to come to the meeting empty handed, she had compiled a list of activities that she was considering pursuing after she left IBM, which included some usual suspects: corporate boards, private equity roles, government service, perhaps write a book? She passed the list to Gerstner, who read through it, then jotted some notes on the page, and passed it back to her.

“I think Lou basically gave me an ‘F’ in retirement planning!” Rometty recalled. “Then he suggested I approach this time of my life differently.”

Gerstner encouraged Rometty to step back and think about her post-IBM years more broadly by resetting her life’s purpose, and creating a strategic plan for how she could apply her skills to her personal mission. Rometty took a great deal away from that meeting, and several years later, she’s found her way to a very successful life of impact and family. “At the center of my circle is creating a global movement around SkillsFirst leadership by helping companies hire and promote people — particularly those from underrepresented groups — based on their skills, not just formal educational degrees,” she said. “I’m just as busy now as I was when I was CEO. It’s just a very different kind of busy.”

“Today, I can say I’m doing pretty well, and feel purpose driven. But the journey to get to this point was certainly not an easy or expected one,” she admitted.

Each year, thousands of executives retire from long and successful corporate careers. But few are prepared for the journey they are about to embark on. Through our work, our experience on and working with corporate boards, and our personal interactions, we’ve observed the journeys into retirement of thousands of executives. We’ve watched people thrive in this new life stage, with some reaching levels of satisfaction and fulfillment they never thought possible. But we’ve also witnessed the long, difficult, and sometimes dark journeys on the way to the other side.

This is true even for the most well-known and respected CEOs in the world — so much so that the three of us decided to help, creating ONYX, an exclusive first-of-its-kind community for very experienced current and recently retired Fortune 500 CEOs. Receptivity has far surpassed our expectations, with more than 50% of the invited CEOs joining the membership. Clearly, this is a significant and under-addressed pain point.

Our recent focus on the executive retirement journey, including conversations with dozens of highly respected former chief executives, has been enlightening to say the least. The twists and turns toward a post-executive life are different for almost every person — but along the way, there are surprisingly common mistakes that, to one degree or another, frustrate, obstruct, and forestall this transition.

We call the most common missteps the seven hidden traps of executive retirement. Becoming aware of them before you begin your journey — and hopefully avoiding them — will de-risk your path to an optimal new life phase and allow you to enjoy the journey along the way.

This feeling of liberation is usually short lived. Having too many choices can lead to decision fatigue, reverting to default options, or even avoiding making a decision altogether. This abundance of alternatives quickly becomes overwhelming at best, and at worst, can lead to an unnecessary period of stagnation and a resulting whiplash right into a series of poor and unretractable decisions.

Pro Tip

As highlighted above, a successful retirement journey begins with a redefinition of your identity, purpose, and mission. Having gone through this exercise, you can now translate these “north star” definitions into a set of decision criteria from which you can evaluate the multitude of options in front of you. Lenses such as “I want to work with teams,” or “I want to impact this specific cause,” or “I want to support younger leaders,” or even “I only want to travel five days a month” can all be used as screens to filter out alluring, but inappropriate engagements that will not take you where you want to go.

“My filters became one, where can I learn the most about things that interest me, and two, where can I have the greatest impact,” said Ferguson. “I have gravitated to things where those two questions intersected the most.”

3. Relying on your old network can distract you from the critical task of building your new one.

The vast majority of your professional network is exactly that — professional. Many entering retirement are shocked when up to 95% of their “personal” relationships turn out to have been merely transactional.

Rebuilding your network is an unexpected but critical necessity. Your retirement network can be every bit as valuable as your previous one. But it will almost certainly be different, and it won’t just build itself. You have to make this a priority. As Rometty told us: “You have to consciously create the future network you want.”

Pro Tip

Join multiple new communities — and the earlier, the better. Find peers who are farther along in the retirement journey and learn from them. Reach out to others with similar personal, professional, and philanthropic interests. Join an established network that proactively facilitates interaction and creates new opportunities for connection and serendipity.

Rekindling old relationships or investing in new ones will lead to valuable and unpredictable outcomes. It is often these new connections who are your most robust channel of inbound opportunities and lead to the most unexpected and fulfilling outcomes.

. Delayed retirement planning can lead to urgent, anxious, and awkward outcomes.

The majority of CEOs and executives we talked with told us they failed to appropriately plan for their retirement — and nearly all told us they waited too long to start. They were working until their very last day. But, as Rometty noted, “A plan is critical. It helps you make better decisions and commitments.”

Without a plan, retirement can feel like falling off a cliff. Delaying the reality of your retirement leads to increased uncertainty, apprehension, and anxiety. Failing to plan early robs you of the opportunity to explore low-risk interactions and gain knowledge, to plant the seeds of new, valuable relationships, and to allocate the time and headspace necessary to become comfortable with your future.

Pro Tip

Begin as early as two years before your expected retirement. Take some quiet time to think about your next life phase. Talk openly with your spouse. What are you excited about? What makes you worry?

“Far too many CEOs are not introspective about this, thinking they are too busy, or the moment will never come, and they will just deal with it sometime in the future,” said Don Gogel, founder and former chairman and CEO of private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. “If you are starting to think about retirement six months prior to leaving, that is way too short a time frame.”

Schedule lunches and dinners with those you respect who have successfully navigated their way through the retirement transition. Reach out to those you think might be helpful in evaluating future opportunities. Begin to replace fear and uncertainty with facts and knowledge. Ultimately, bring this all together in a strategic retirement plan.

5. Decisive behaviors that worked for you as an executive can work against you in retirement.

For many executives, a frenetic environment is the norm, even their most comfortable state of being. Then they retire, and … silence. The phone stops ringing. Your calendar is empty. It’s late morning, you’ve read four newspapers front to back, and you’re wondering: “Is it embarrassing to go to lunch at 11 am?” Over time this sudden absence of activity can lead to feelings of boredom, emptiness, and loss of self-worth.

To make matters worse, executives are often told: “Don’t commit to anything for at least six months.” Following this advice can have the unintended consequence of further, artificial isolation. The silence becomes acute. The pressure continues to build. And then … snap!

We’ve seen too many executives whiplash abruptly back into the professional world, committing to the set of opportunities that happens to be in front of them at that moment of great vulnerability. Some have even accepted another full-time executive role after committing to themselves — and those close to them — not to. Attempts at a rational or planned approach are tossed aside in favor of emotional decisions meant to fill a short-term void. Sometimes things work out, but mostly this leads to significant, misaligned commitments that are painfully difficult to unwind.

Pro Tip

The initial phase of retirement is the perfect time to make small, smart bets and learn as much about potential opportunities, and yourself, as possible.

First, make a list of the types of activities you think you would like to do in retirement. Next, and perhaps most importantly, make a list of assumptions about what “the work” of these engagements will be like, and why you think you will enjoy it. Finally, begin to identify low-risk opportunities to experiment, test your assumptions, and validate that the day-to-day activities you will be engaged in are as satisfying as you anticipated.

wait for the best opportunities to come along – you searched them out and landed them. Over time, the teams that worked for you began to source and bring to you new opportunities to consider.

When you retire, your pipeline of inbound opportunities begins to dry up. This can be a humbling experience. The majority of executives we’ve worked with aren’t accustomed to touting themselves as “experts,” or proactively promoting their personal “brand” in the market. They are much more comfortable crediting their teams for their success. These traits make for great servant leadership, but do little to restock a pipeline of new opportunities in retirement.

In retirement, new opportunities will likely still come to you. But without a sufficient pipeline, it’s impossible to know how much these engagements are being “sold” to you, and how they actually stack up against other, less visible opportunities.  Waiting for the phone to ring will ultimately result in trying to make the best out of an unnecessarily limited set of alternatives.

“I wanted to give back as much as I could, so I started hunting for things,” Lafley told us. “You have to pick your area of desired impact and go find the best opportunities to make it happen.”

Pro Tip

Designing your optimal retirement lifestyle requires uncovering potential opportunities in the marketplace — and also making sure that opportunities can find you. Being proactive in your search increases the opportunities from which to choose from, increases your odds of success, builds confidence, and helps you avoid becoming stuck in roles you don’t like.

Dust off the old resume. Network online and offline. Consider informational interviews, cold calling, and even working with organizations to craft a role which doesn’t currently exist.

All of this takes effort, but it will pay off in the long run. Never forget, you are the lead designer for the rest of your life.

. . .

Today’s definition of retirement is entirely new, marked by a desire to continue working, to create a portfolio of activities and engagements, to make a meaningful positive impact, and to design an overall lifestyle that keeps you engaged, excited and active. Avoiding these seven common traps will help make the transition more efficient and enjoyable. It may even lead you to your most fulfilling life stage yet.

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