An accomplished CEO living out a fulfilling retirement, Mark Lamberti says the key to avoiding a postretirement identity crisis is to live beyond your business card.
As a CEO, your schedule is often packed with meetings, business dealings, and everything in between, leaving little time to focus on the affairs of the outside world. However, as you retire and transition into the life of a civilian, all of this can change as you come to realize your schedule is empty and you never nurtured your purpose outside of your career. A veteran CEO with a knack for understanding human behavior, Mark Lamberti has cultivated a fulfilling retirement with a schedule packed with everything from philanthropy to educational pursuits and recreation and warns that executives who don’t follow suit are apt to face an identity crisis.
The Identity Void of Retirement:
According to a 2018 study from Harvard Business Review, the average CEO works 62.5 hours per week (including weekends), sustaining their grueling schedules with an emphasis on face-to-face interaction and team building with their constituents. However, when faced with retirement, these interactions quickly fade, as Lamberti too often saw his colleagues face the unfortunate reality of their lives outside of work, which lacked true connection or purpose due to the harsh schedules they maintained.
“You had these people coming from very high-level jobs, quarterly reporting deadlines, answering to the press, answering to stakeholders, dealing with staff issues, dealing with acquisitions, all of this kind of stuff. And then they retire, there’s a fancy farewell party, and suddenly they hit, what I called in my research, a massive void,” Lamberti explains.
Investigating this void in his doctoral thesis, “Exploring Postretirement Role Identity Emergence in Public Company CEOs”, Lamberti has found that those who never looked at themselves apart from their career have a hard time finding fulfillment in their golden years. “First of all, let me say that the DBA was a consequence of observation, and my observation was that when people in very senior positions, CEOs and top executives retire, you see they go in various directions. Some of them, they’ve made a few [bucks], they retire to the coast, they play golf three times a week — and you can’t have an interesting conversation with them in three years’ time. Their world becomes very small. You see others who go out and continue to live meaningful contributing, lives,” Mark Lamberti said at a recent Wits Leadership Dialogue event.
What separates these two groups? Mark Lamberti posits that the former have allowed their business role to dominate their life and self-image, while the latter has cultivated active roles, identities, and passions outside their title as a CEO. Those CEOs who wear blinders until the day of their retirement are in for a wake-up call, as they’re often stuck wasting part of their precious retirement reflecting upon the past and looking for a fulfilling path forward.
“They would suddenly have these blinding insights into who they were and who the people around them expected them to be, because quite frankly, for many of them, that was the first time they’d been able to pause and think about themselves beyond their career” he says.
Investing in Ourselves to Avoid an Identity Crisis:
To avoid this rut of retirement, CEOs must take the time before they step down- whether it be through a sabbatical, improved work/life balance, or deep introspection- to realign with what’s truly important to their well-being- from their health to their support systems and the discovery and fulfillment of new lifestyle – and focus their energy towards it.
“Without this investment of time and effort in ourselves, we will look back and realize that we have not grown — we have not done those things necessary to realize our potential and to be the best we can be,” Lamberti cautions.
While this realignment is not something that occurs overnight, Lamberti contends that once you identify these active roles and identities that support your passion and well-being, how you invest in them becomes as second nature as working towards a goal. “Who am I, or who do I want to be? When you’ve defined that, how you allocate your time and your effort and your energies and your focus becomes almost self-evident,” he states.
For Mark Lamberti, this definition manifested into everything from non-executive directorships and coaching to philanthropy and academia. This schedule is likely fuller than most retirees, but he attests it’s the easiest way to ease into your golden years. “So my suggestion is nurture your identities beyond your business role,” he says in one final assertion.
“I think that’s why I’m enjoying this new transition of my own towards academia,” he continues. “I’m purposefully widening and deepening my knowledge and finding exciting stimuli in it. And I’ve got challenging associates and new friends. The consensus seems to be that physical, intellectual and emotional health are the cornerstones of well-being and fulfillment in retirement. The problem with a life built on achievement is that the alternative may seem like failure.
Realizing that this is far from the truth is the first step in the creation of a new retiree identity and entry into what can be one of life’s most meaningful and enjoyable phases.
Stay connected with Mark Lamberti: https://twitter.com/markjlamberti?lang=en
