Life after the C-suite: Retirement ideas for CEOs

It’s the standard American retirement story: You announce your retirement, you receive a gold watch, and then you live a life of golf, leisure, and the occasional visit from the grandkids.

To most executives, this standard retirement story leaves a hole. An executive mulling life after the C-suite might consider this story and wonder:

• Where’s the excitement?
• How can I use all the energy I still have?
• How can I pass on all that I learned?

These are common ponderings. A 2019 survey from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found that 80 percent of people at retirement age want to keep working for financial reasons—after all, people now have the potential to live healthily for longer—and 72 percent of people said they wanted to keep working to age well.

Healthy aging itself is a great reason to keep going past retirement, as research shows that extending your career could also extend your life. A 2015 study of more than 83,000 people, for example, found that those who worked past the age of 65 were three times more likely to report being in good health than those who had retired.

But another good reason to keep going is to simply continue on your path, to take the knowledge you learned on your path and pass it on. As an executive with years of experience, you have so much to give to others, so much that could make a difference in someone else’s career.

Whatever your reason for pushing beyond retirement, it’s clear that many retired CEOs are reconsidering what it means to retire. Wondering what to do in retirement? Review our guide that explores some of the top retirement ideas for CEOs to find purpose beyond the boardroom.

How Do You Navigate the Transition After Leadership?

Transitioning out of your position as a CEO requires careful planning, communication, and delegation. Before exploring things to do in retirement, it’s crucial to have a plan in place that ensures a smooth and successful transition. Below are steps you can take to navigate this major life change:

• Long-term planning: As a CEO, having a long-term plan is a must. Thinking well into the future by considering your financial situation and personal goals for retirement can ensure you enjoy your golden years how you envision them.
• Succession planning: Before stepping down, a crucial responsibility of a CEO is to begin succession planning well in advance. As you consider who you will pass the torch to, carefully identify potential successors within the company, which may involve developing their leadership skills or improving their technical knowledge to ensure you leave a lasting legacy.
• Delegate responsibilities: Navigating the transition after leadership requires strong problem-solving skills, especially when it comes to delegation. Before exiting, start delegating your responsibilities to other members within your organization, and encourage these individuals to take ownership and make decisions they believe in.
• Communicate early: Before a CEO announces retirement, communicating those plans early is essential. As you prepare to leave, consult with stakeholders, other C-suite executives, your board of directors, and employees, as transparency helps instill trust and maintain stability within the organization.
• Emotional preparation: Transitioning out of leadership is a significant life change that can come with some heavy emotions. After years of leadership development and working hard to grow your organization to where it stands today, it’s expected to feel emotional. As you start your transition, seek guidance and support from mentors, coaches, peers, and mental health professionals.
• Stay involved: Just because you’re departing your position doesn’t mean you have the sever ties right away. As the transition unfolds, make sure to stay involved and remain available for guidance and support by offering mentorship to your successor and providing guidance when needed.

The transition out of the C-suite can be daunting, but there’s a lot on the horizon as you consider your exit strategy. Let’s explore how a CEO announces retirement in more detail in the next section.

How Can CEOs Announce Their Departure?

As the face of your organization, time for strategic planning needs to be set aside as you announce your departure as CEO. Maintaining transparency can help reassure stakeholders and facilitate a seamless transition. Below are tips for CEOs announcing retirement:

• Plan the timing of your announcement carefully: When announcing your retirement, make sure to choose a time that’s appropriate, such as aligning your announcement with the release of quarterly or annual financial results or during a scheduled meeting with your top stakeholders.
• Draft a concise message: Writing your retirement speech will take some time. As you craft your message, focus on the positive results from your time at the helm, highlighting your contributions along with the reasons for your departure.
• Address succession plans: As stated, having succession plans in place is crucial when planning your retirement as CEO. When announcing your departure, make sure to address these plans clearly with stakeholders, board members, the senior leadership team, and employees.
• Express gratitude: Being CEO is a major undertaking that comes with a lot of responsibility. As the leader of your organization, you navigated various challenges and obstacles, getting your organization to the place it is today. As you announce your exit, express your gratitude to all those who helped and trusted you along the way, and motivate your employees to continue with the hard work to keep your vision moving forward.
• Provide resources: To prepare for your exit, make sure to inform employees and other individuals of available resources they can rely on if they have questions or concerns about the transition, such as your HR department.

What Are Post-CEO Career Ideas?

Now that you’ve planned and announced your departure, you may be wondering what to do when retired. One of the exciting things about retirement is that the opportunities are endless. As CEO, there are countless career paths you can follow to bring your skills elsewhere. Below are some of the top ideas on what to do in retirement.

1. Executive coaching

If you’ve been successful in the C-suite, your mind is a treasure trove of information that could help the next generation of leaders thrive.

Your career as an executive puts you in a unique position. By virtue of your experience, you can profoundly impact the lives of people who are, for the first time, seeing the problems you spent your career solving.

As CEO, there are a variety of reasons to join a peer advisory group and work as a Vistage Chair to provide coaching services. Your knowledge of leadership can make your voice the one helping new leaders learn how to lead. Your history of successes and failures can impart advice that only you can give, advice that would be lost without you. Your guidance and equanimity, learned over years in the fray, might be what sets the example for a new CEO.

If you love mentoring people and spending time talking strategy, you’d be perfectly suited to becoming an executive coach.

2. Teaching

If you want to help people but would prefer to get to them before they’re in business, start teaching.

Teaching may be a good route for executives who can easily explain how to work from first principles, picking away the jargon to plainly explain concepts of business. Aside from that, CEOs have a plethora of transferable skills that can aid them in the teaching world. Some of the top transferable skills of CEOs that they learned on the job that can transfer to the classroom include:

• Leadership: As a CEO-turned-teacher, you can lead by example and demonstrate integrity by inspiring students to become the best versions of themselves. In turn, you can provide direction, set goals, and foster a positive learning environment.
• Communication: As CEO, you’ve had conversations with a wide range of individuals, and these conversations helped strengthen your communication skills. In the classroom, you can transfer these communication skills through various forms like verbal, written, and interpersonal skills to convey information and explain complex concepts.
• Decision-Making: CEOs understand the art of making hard decisions under pressure, taking various factors into account, and weighing every possible outcome. As a teacher, decision-making skills are needed every day, especially when it comes to your curriculum, teaching methods, and classroom management.
• Strategic Planning: Another skill every CEO possesses is the ability to develop long-term strategies to drive success. This is imperative in the classroom, as you need to consider the entire term to develop lesson plans, set learning objectives, and assess student performance over time.
• Adaptability: As the key decision-maker in your organization, you’ve had to navigate complex business environments and remain adaptable and resilient to respond to challenges. When teaching, this skill will prove invaluable, allowing you to cater to the needs of diverse learners from all backgrounds and abilities to adapt teaching strategies and modify plans to accommodate individual needs.
• Problem-Solving: CEOs are proficient problem-solvers, which is another skill essential for the classroom. Problem-solving capabilities allow you to navigate challenges like academic struggles and behavioral issues and devise impactful solutions to support student success.
• Innovation: Creativity is essential in education, and your skills of experimentation and continuous improvement in business allow you to innovate in the classroom by incorporating new technologies and teaching methods to enhance student engagement.
• Emotional Intelligence: Many CEOs have strong emotional intelligence, which is imperative when building a strong rapport with students and managing classroom dynamics. With your emotional intelligence skills, you can connect with students and address their social and emotional needs to create a positive classroom environment. 

There are universities, community colleges, and online platforms where a well-taught class by a former executive would be invaluable. In the right class, you may create a lightbulb moment for students who could go on to become great leaders.

3. Authorship

If you want to be remembered and spread what you’ve learned to a potentially large audience, consider writing a book.

Books give the rare ability to pass down information and have your story be remembered throughout history. Many still speak highly of Alfred P. Sloan’s book “My Years With General Motors,” and Sloan retired from the company in 1946. Many of the lessons he wrote then still stand—” There is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy,” Sloan wrote.

But don’t be mistaken: Writing is an arduous, lonely task that often ends with your book going unread. You should only write a book if you’d be happy to have written it, even if it goes unread.

4. Becoming a board member

A popular route for executives after retirement is working in or advising other companies, often in the nonprofit space. Marc Feigen and Ron Williams wrote in the Harvard Business Review that they studied the post-retirement careers of 50 CEOs. More than half of them ended up in leadership positions at a nonprofit, with two-thirds serving on public boards.

Far from a leisure activity, retired executives who serve on a board or lead a nonprofit still get to use their energy, intellect, and decision-making ability. If you feel that you still have a lot left, this may be a great option for retirement—or, more honestly stated, your next career move.

5. Serving in government

Whether a local school board or the U.S. Senate, life after retirement may afford executives the time to run for office. And the government could always use a few more good people skilled in critical thinking, decision-making, and the ability to manage.

But be warned: Politics may be one of the few lines of work with more stress than the board room.

What Are Personal Growth Opportunities for CEOs After Retirement?

For CEOs looking to focus on personal growth opportunities compared to professional, there are numerous routes you can take. Below are some of the top retirement ideas for CEOs to grow personally, from embarking on travel adventures to philanthropic endeavors.

1. Traveling

If you’re truly done working but still have a lot of energy to spare, traveling the world is a great way to spend your retirement years. The world is filled with an amazing number of cultures, each with its own insights into humanity.

As you consider retirement ideas like travel, you can ensure the destination you choose allows you to explore new interests and hobbies. Through travel, whether domestic or abroad, you can visit iconic landmarks, immerse yourself in different cultures, and embark on adventurous journeys that open you to a world of firsts. Retirement offers the freedom to discover, along with an excellent opportunity to forge deeper connections with your spouse, family, friends, and the strangers you meet along the way.

2. Continuing education

And for the retired executive who likes to travel, nothing is more important than learning—languages, history, and cultural norms. But even if you don’t want to travel—even if you don’t want to do anything else—it’s essential to keep learning.

By continuing to learn, you increase your brain’s cognitive functions and allow yourself to find new passions. New passions could lead to doing something else on this list or may simply lead you to more learning. In learning, there is no age—there’s simply the expansive mountain of books, an internet full of data, and a world full of people filled with thoughts, emotions, and information.

As Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in his book “Meditations,” you can “look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”

3. Family time

Life in the C-suite can be extremely demanding, which means you might have had to make some hard sacrifices to ensure the success of your company. One of those sacrifices might have impacted your family time. While you can’t make up time, retirement gives you the opportunity to connect with your family, whether your spouse, kids, siblings, or parents, on a deeper level that you might not have been able to before.

When it comes to things to do in retirement with your family, the opportunities are endless. Traveling, golfing, family dinners — these are just some of the many ideas that allow you to forge stronger bonds with those you love. 

4. Philanthropic endeavors

In their research and interviews of retired CEOs, Feigen and Williams found that nearly all are philanthropic in some way, running foundations or donating money.

Bill Weldon, former chairman of Johnson & Johnson, told them that philanthropy is psychologically rewarding and offers “payback far better than any money we receive in our for-profit work.”

Similarly, there are plenty of organizations across the world in need of volunteers. If you’re passionate about an issue, it’s likely that you’ll be welcomed by an organization that needs your help, even if it’s completely outside your area of expertise.

5. Healthy living

Running a company takes a lot of time and effort, and over the course of your tenure, the built-up stress that comes with the immense responsibility of serving as CEO can add up. One of the top retirement ideas for many CEOs is to take time to reinvent themselves and lead a healthy lifestyle. With more time on your hands, you can start taking care of your body, whether spending time in the kitchen to create healthy, home-cooked meals or venturing out into the world and exercising through hiking, biking, swimming, or any other sport. 

Living a healthy lifestyle goes beyond diet and exercise. It also means fostering the relationships in your life and maintaining your cognitive strength. Through social interactions, reading, and remaining busy, you can continue living a rewarding life after the C-suite.

Wrapping Up: Life Beyond the Boardroom

Retirement offers an opportunity to look back over your career, thinking of the moments that shaped and moved you. You can pass these moments along by becoming an executive coach or teacher or using your experience to do something entirely different. Let these moments guide you down the path to retirement.

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