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When you’re a newly graduated student with your Master of Business degree fresh in hand, or a recent hire on day one of your first corporate job, your mind is likely filled with big ideas and eager dreams of the important mark you plan to make in the weeks, months, and years ahead of you. Mark Lamberti, a seasoned CEO whose decisive leadership elevated three public-facing South African companies to the top of their market sector, understands better than most that for anyone just starting out, envisioning the future is inevitable. He warns, however, that many would-be executives embarking on business careers who concentrate solely on the impact they hope to have, rather than reflecting on the impact their career is going to have on them, do so at their own peril.
Why All Work and No Play Makes a CEO Poor Candidate for Retirement
Time has a funny way of catching up with all of us. Mark Lamberti says if rookies on the executive track don’t start out as they mean to go on, by the time retirement eventually comes knocking, those who never bothered to establish a healthy work/life balance because they were too busy investing all of themselves in strategizing another step up the ladder or negotiating the next big deal are likely in for a rude awakening.
Having witnessed firsthand the consequences of poor work/life balance planning amongst his peers, Lamberti notes that unless they’d worked as hard at crafting fulfilling lives outside the office as they had behind their executive desks, the transition all too often left many retiring CEOs feeling totally lost at sea. In fact, the dichotomy between CEOs who adjusted well to their post-career lives and those who found themselves adrift so intrigued Lamberti, that it became the subject of the doctoral thesis, “Exploring Postretirement Role Identity Emergence in Public Company CEOs,” he undertook at the University of Pretoria’s highly esteemed Gordon Institute of Business Science. “I wanted to understand [the process they’re going through, coming to those post-retirement life decisions. And so I thought there’s no better way to study it than formally at doctoral level.”
Leaders Who Leave the Corporate Nest Unprepared are Flying Blind
At a recent Wits Leadership Dialogue event at his MBA alma mater, Wits Business School, Lamberti outlined what led him to pursue the post-retirement phase of CEOs’ lives as a line of study. “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 Plettenberg Bay, they play golf three times a week — and you can’t have a 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.”
Lamberti’s research turned up several very interesting things, however, the most striking recurring theme was that those people whose identity was wholly invested in their business card were the ones who suffered the most when that business card became obsolete. “In other words, people who had spent their whole lives in one business who defined themselves as ‘the CEO of X,’ everything changed. The next day, there was no infrastructure to support you. The email stopped. You found out that the people that you thought were your real friends, were actually your ‘deal friends.’”
When ‘Work You’ and ‘Retirement You’ Don’t Match Up
Many CEOs who’d always been ahead of the curve in business dealings were sorely unprepared for their next chapter. With no exceptions, every respondent to his thesis survey replied that they weren’t well-prepared for retirement. “They were doing the last deal. They were trying to get their company into good shape before they left,” Lamberti reports. “They were trying to make sure that they had successors in place, and they were so obsessed with finishing off on a high note that none of them had really applied their minds to life after being a CEO.”
Few understood that in the structure of corporate society, there’s a transactional component to many relationships, but once you retire, those relationships — that many valued as friendships — very often expire. When it suddenly dawned on outgoing executives that they’d been cut off, the consequence manifested in serious separation issues — anxiety, stress, self-doubt, and uncertainty. The realization that they were no longer the person in charge led to sudden blinding insights Lamberti classified as epiphanies. “[The post-retirement void forced them to reflect on who they were without the status, trappings and infrastructure of their executive role. They were also shocked by how their closest relationships were affected by their retirement. For many of them, this was the first time they’d experienced deep introspective reflection on those elements of self-unrelated to their executive roles.”
The bottom lines: those who had active roles and identities beyond their CEO roles fared much better in coming to terms with their new life. Lamberti reports that CEOs who enjoyed well-rounded lives beyond the office took between 18 to 24 months to settle comfortably into retirement. Those who had active roles and identities beyond their CEO role fared better. Those who did not fared worse. It was that simple.
The Crucial Importance of Investing in Work/Life Balance
“With greater work and relationship pressures we may find that we neglect to invest time and effort in our own physical health, our own learning and intellectual growth, and our own psychological and spiritual well-being,” Lamberti cautioned. “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.”
“Work/life balance is at best an elusive ideal and at worst a complete myth, today’s senior executives will tell you,” authors Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams wrote in a March 2014 article in the Harvard Business Review. “But by making deliberate choices about which opportunities they’ll pursue and which they’ll decline, rather than simply reacting to emergencies, leaders can and do engage meaningfully with work, family, and community. They’ve discovered through hard experience that prospering in the senior ranks is a matter of carefully combining work and home so as not to lose themselves, their loved ones, or their foothold on success.”
For his own part, Mark Lamberti, who considers himself “semi-retired” says he was careful to invest in himself on a human level, and while he excelled in his corporate life, he never allowed his business card to define him. A devoted father and husband, when he wasn’t serving on the board of several public companies, Lamberti was an avid water and snow skier. He and his family traveled the globe. He even learned to fly a helicopter. “And so I’m saying to you right now, do things beyond your business,” Lamberti urged his Wits audience. “Have interests beyond just your job.”