Mature leaders seek out advisors when they step into a leadership role, and boards should view a leader’s desire to have one or more trusted advisors as an indicator of humility and strength. Many of the most experienced and accomplished leaders I know have one or two advisors they continue to retain across multiple roles in different organizations. Overly insecure or arrogant leaders simply don’t seek out an advisor.

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 among many possibilities.