Retire Retirement in Favor of a New Season
Maple Leaves and Pinecones
Cliché images for the arrival of Autumn in North America tend to favor the beautiful sugar maple leaves on trees just before falling. In my new neighborhood, the first October winds bring a rain of ponderosa pine needles and a hailstorm of their beautiful, if thorny, pinecones (pictured above). Over the course of my life, I have lived in California, Washington State, Tennessee, Sweden, Virginia, Illinois, and Michigan. The natural beauty of the Fall season is very apparent in all these places, but each region looks quite different from another. If you have only lived in one of these locations, you might be excused for imagining that Fall only has one look.
As I moved into leadership roles and started working with people making big decisions about “retirement,” I realized I was making some significant, erroneous assumptions about the meaning of this concept. As an early and mid-career professional, I understood retirement as “the act of leaving one’s job and ceasing participation in the workforce.” Without examining my assumptions, I imagined retirees as people with almost unlimited discretionary time, low golf handicaps, and time to work through a great reading list in sunny places while the rest of us worked through the winter. But just as the red maple leaf is not nature’s only harbinger of Fall, retreat from the workforce describes only one aspect of a multitude of possibilities.
Retiring Retirement
I don’t know where I got the idea that purpose expires upon retirement—after all, my parents’ career journey has not squared with this misconception. My father had a master’s degree in social work and worked as a federal probation and parole officer until mandatory retirement at 57. Upon “retirement,” he did not exit the workforce but stepped into a completely new season in life. He served a non-profit as a licensed therapist, drove the ambulance as a volunteer for the fire department on the island where I grew up, and did part-time contract work conducting background checks for the federal government.
My father is now 80, and my parents have moved to a town to be closer to my sister and have stepped into yet another new season of life. My dad has left ambulance driving behind but now spends one day a week as a volunteer at a wildlife shelter and still has time to do some contract work. This list of jobs briefly summarizes my father’s “resume virtues,” as David Brooks calls them in The Second Mountain. But to retire only to get busy with other interests overlooks the fact that my father made many of these decisions so he could nurture meaningful relationships with our family, his friends, his neighbors, his church, and his community.
My reflection on just this one life should make it clear that retirement is not the right word for what happened when his season of work ended as a federal probation and parole officer at age 57. And it is not what happens for most people who choose to “retire.” Yes, my father left the job he had for decades but has also happily worked for 23 years since that time in various roles and with several different arrangements (full-time, part-time, contract, and volunteer). He has pursued meaning in his relationships, preserved a sense of purpose, and continued using his gifts to contribute to society. The concept of retirement needs to be retired because it only describes the work that has ended, not the possibilities of what might be imagined next.
Guidance in a Time of Discernment
After 28 years in higher education as a professor, senior administrator, and university president, I started to wonder how long I could or should continue this work. I had a meaningful career, enjoyed working with some fantastic people, and was more than a decade shy of the traditional retirement age. But some strong crosscurrents in my heart and my family life also pulled me in another direction. My family lived 2,000 miles away from where we lived in Grand Rapids, and the pandemic had made them feel even more distant. I was bone weary from working so hard during the pandemic years and was concerned I might not be able to bounce back.
Used by permission of the New Yorker Cartoon Bank
But the idea of “retirement” was complex for me. Ceasing to participate in the workforce was not what I had in mind. I had always had a strong sense of duty to serve in every role in any weather and had never decided to stop doing anything before. In all prior cases of career transition, I was tapped on the shoulder and invited to consider the next thing. I fully embraced the idea of more time with my family, but leaving the workforce didn’t really square with my sense of what was next. So, I privately wrestled with these tensions from the summer of 2020 through the following academic year.
Many of my presidential colleagues were considering similar questions about their own vocation, especially during the pandemic. As I listened to them, I started to see how paralyzing the idea of retirement is to people who work 24/7/365 jobs like university presidents. Some have allowed the role to become their identity. Some worry that if they are not a college president, they will not be qualified to do anything else. All of us know that we serve in a role weighted with purpose. It is hard to imagine finding such purpose in other pursuits. Most also can’t afford the time to think about how their time in this role will end. But it will end for all of us, and it is essential to anticipate and plan for it.
Wrestling with these questions is also isolating. Few leaders want to risk letting anyone else into the process. I know too many presidents who shared misgivings about a contract extension with board members, only to have it pulled back and be shown the door. And within an organization, nothing whips up a rumor mill faster than the whisper that a leader is thinking about retirement. The same risks are also present when sharing doubts with peers or professional friends. I found it very helpful to talk with a few trusted peers in similar roles, but only a few could refrain from projecting their own fears into my thought process. Your friends and family may know you well, but they often don’t understand the role. Your peers may understand the role but don’t have the time to know you well. These conversations helped me to see that I needed an independent guide and a structured process to help me ask good questions about myself, my work, my hopes, my commitments, and my future.
Imagining my Next Season
During this period of vocational wrestling, I was introduced to an advisory service committed to helping executive leaders discern whether it is time to end and, if so, plan an excellent ending to a season of leadership and service. For an hour a month over six months, I met with the co-founder of My Next Season, Mark Linz, who had worked as a senior executive at a major financial institution during the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession. Out of a conviction that well-planned, positive endings are good for organizations and good for their leaders (present and future), Mark teamed up with co-founder Dr. Leslie Braksick to form MyNextSeason, and it has been helping companies and their leaders to plan fruitful futures ever since. The MNS resources were so helpful, the advisors all have significant executive experience, and the kind, helpful staff, listen well and are committed to each client’s success and a good ending for the organization.
Engaging in this process helped me review and affirm my deepest commitments at this stage of life, clarify my sense of purpose and vocation beyond my last day of work as president, and understand how my experience is valued in other work environments. I also needed to plan a more balanced, restful way of living. This is much harder than it looks when you have been living a 24/7/365 lifestyle for decades. The temptation to “hyperfocus on the lawn” to exercise our achievement muscles is more alluring than it sounds in the cartoon. The process helped me to get in touch with the aspects of my work that brought me deep joy, for example, investing in the development of others who lead for a living and considering how this joy might be realized in a new role. Working through this structured process helped me to develop a vision for the future my family could support after the end of the university presidency.
Once my departure was announced, people in the community sheepishly began to ask me, “So, what’s next?” I used to write with sympathy for college graduates who got this question from well-meaning friends and relatives throughout their senior year. Now the question was being turned back on me. Thankfully, the team at MyNextSeason had already prepared me for this question and had worked with me to articulate the value of my experience in a way that aligned with my long-term goals. Their excellent support helped me to refresh my bio, appreciate my network of professional colleagues, and renew my LinkedIn profile. They also helped me to anticipate the feelings of loss and understand the ambiguity of my role during this transition.
More than all these aspects, this process allowed me to make this significant career change with conviction and confidence. Andrea and I have moved across the country, from maple trees to ponderosa pines, into a new season of life. We have retired the notion of retirement. The MyNextSeason process was so transformative for me that I entered into a partnership with MyNextSeason. I now experience the joy of helping others who serve in executive positions plan fruitful next seasons.
Are your questions about your future signaling the need to retreat, renew, and re-engineer your leadership, or is it time to consider what's next? Contact Michael Le Roy for a free, confidential consultation.