The only thing I know for sure about retirement is that I did not know anything about retirement until it happened.

As a young man in the real estate business, I thought I might retire at 55 or maybe 65 at the latest. At the time, I was selling land to developers of large residential developments or commercial  centers in Southern California, often doing my scouting on horseback and loving the terrain.

In my late 40s, I switched focus to pursue management with a national real estate firm for 15 years, rising to the role of national sales director which eventually proved to be too removed from the action of sales and maybe too safe.

Eventually, it seemed like a logical step to start developing real estate myself, with a specialty in large industrial and commercial buildings. Wow—incompetence at last! So much so that I no longer had the luxury of speculating when I might retire. Apparently I was going to have to work forever.

When my company moved on without me, they delivered me to outplacement—a soft landing designed to help me recover and move on. Turns out I was taken by this environment in which trained professionals help people learn what they love, what they’re great at, and how that translates into next career steps. Long story short, I shed/shredded my “what’s next” in real estate and took a dramatic financial hit to pursue the profession of helping others connect with their best selves and right livelihood.

My life surged ahead, rich with purpose and meaning. After outplacement, I moved into the satisfying field of executive coaching. And somehow, without noticing, I found myself in my mid-70s, living life to the fullest, making a difference on my terms, owning my own firm, and allocating my interests and time as I saw fit.

At the same time, though, I was becoming much more family-centric with the arrival of grandbabies, and close friends began passing from my lifescape. One  day, after a generous global coaching assignment came to an end, I abruptly stopped my business life, took off my tie, and imagined that maybe I was retired.

I had no plan, no sense of the future, and very few role models to follow. I traveled the world, played with my wife who continued to manage our company, saw much more of my grown children, got a little better at golf, and tried to catch my breath. Little did I know that I was also sick. No need for details here except to say that I was thrown into a medical protocol that would  kill part of me for the sake of curing me—and that the recovery of my energy and good spirits would be a matter of years, not months.

My diminishing number of very close friends were also making up their lives as they went along, with varying degrees of fulfillment and gusto. We didn’t know that we needed a place to sort out our best selves and key strengths and identify next steps at this new stage of life—exactly what drew me to the outplacement business in the first place.

Outplacement happens after being booted from the last career assignment. But outplacement to retirement needs to start before we make that leap. I actually could have used a lot of help in unplugging from my work life and plugging into my post-work life in a way that was organized and responsible to both my colleagues and my wife and family. And I needed help to find the next application of my passions and strengths (including and beyond great grandfathering).

To that end, my wife and her partner created Life Reinspired to help aspiring retirees make their next chapter their best chapter yet through rich conversations with each other. My wife is younger than me, yet she’s grappling with these same issues and knew that there is a need for planning the chapter formerly known as “retirement.” I wish I had had access to this process before I landed on the far side of the divide, but I sure am glad it exists now for the benefit of companies and individuals who desire to leave well and live well in the land of what’s next.

Find out how LifeReinspired can support your or your company’s retiring executives.

Michael Karr MacNeill is a senior advisor to Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating a meaningful next chapter of life.

Too often we underestimate the impact of leaving a vocation of many years that has given purpose, the satisfaction of mastery, and the good feeling of being of service to our fellow human beings.  The impact is especially felt in the medical community.  At some point on the journey, the aging body can no longer meet the rigorous demands of the job and the medical institution will no longer support the practice of the aging medical professional, so retirement is either chosen or forced.  For many this is a time of loss and grieving.  Questions arise, such as, what do I do now? How am I going to find purpose?  Will I lose touch with my colleagues? Who am I without my practice? How do I find value in society if I’m no longer serving as a medical professional? How will I support myself financially?  What will happen to my patients?

And not only is the individual impacted, a medical professional’s retirement has important implications for patients, hospitals and health care systems.  According to a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, January 16, 2017, physician retirement tends to be a difficult subject for hospitals and other medical facilities to broach.  They must strike a “delicate balance between encouraging preparation for retirement and delaying the timing and eventual transitions of its most experienced staff who will be replaced by a growing pool of younger physician who stand waiting in the wings for professional opportunities.”  So everyone in the medical picture is impacted – the institution and it’s administration, the medical professional retiring, the medical colleagues, and the patients.

What this requires is a communication plan and program in place that supports all parties in the equation.  What we’ve found through our work at Life Reinspired is that the values of the institution, the well-being of all the players, and the intended outcomes of the plan all need to be taken into consideration.  Rather than the topic of retirement being a white elephant in the room that no one wants to address until it’s time for a medical professional to retire, it’s important to have the topic be part of ongoing communications throughout the organization as a natural part of the cycle of a career.  Training hospital staff in how to have the conversation and offering well planned off-boarding programs also assist in making a smooth transition for all parties involved.  They can be budget friendly to the institution, help to attract top talent, and create goodwill in the communities they support.

Find out more about how Life Reinspired programs can add value to your organization and to the lives of your retiring employees.

Sabrina Roblin is Co-Founder of Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating a meaningful next chapter in life. Sabrina is an experienced executive, mentor, trainer, and coach. She has worked for organizations that include Wells Fargo Bank, Broderbund Software, and The Coaches Training Institute.

Transfer of institutional knowledge from an exiting manager or executive to a successor and/or internal team is the most critical aspect of the exit process.

This knowledge includes both the practical and relationship knowledge it takes to make a company or department run well. It can take months to years to set up good processes and relationships, and to learn how different departments interface to create successful outcomes in the business.  This knowledge can be taken for granted.  Depending on the position the employee held and the type of business, it can take months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to absorb the breakdown in process generated by the exit and then rebuild what was lost.  This has impact on product quality, employee morale and customer satisfaction and thus the bottom line.  Because there isn’t a budget line for this sort of cost and impact, it often gets overlooked until it is felt after the exit, and then it’s too late to do anything about it.

Planning ahead is essential. Think about both the practical skills and experience that need to be replaced for successful business outcomes, as well as the personal qualities needed for employee morale and productivity. Here are some key questions that will guide you in your planning:

• What key relationships is the exiting manager/executive involved in? For this question it’s important to look at the reporting relationships structure both above and below the employee as well as the lateral relationships which are often overlooked.
• How are business outcomes impacted through those relationships? What is the employee doing day-to-day to keep work moving forward through these relationships? How will you transfer them? Will they all go to one person or multiple people?
• What business process knowledge does the departing employee hold? Is it written down anywhere?  If not, how much can be documented, who will document it and how long will that take?  Who will be trained to keep those processes moving forward? Will it be an individual or a team who takes this on?
• What skills and experience does the departing employee have that need to be replaced in the organization? Will that be done through mentoring inside the organization or through hiring from the outside? Or both?
• What is it about the departing employee that everyone will miss? It could be integrity, kindness, good leadership, clear communication…whatever it is, those are qualities that keep employees productive in the business.  Look both inside to mentor and grow these qualities in existing employees and outside the organization to hire them in.

You may look at this list and think, who has the time and budget to do this?  The business will spend the time and money one way or the other. If you wait until after the exit, the cost in time and money will be higher, and the risk of negative impact on product quality and customer satisfaction will be higher.  Planning ahead mitigates cost and negative impact on the business and thus the bottom line. An added bonus is through this process you may end up asking lots of great questions with the outcome of more efficient processes and relationships overall.

Contact us to learn more about how our Life Reinspired programs can help add value to your company while supporting your retiring employees.

Sabrina Roblin is Co-Founder of Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating a meaningful next chapter in life. Sabrina is an experienced executive, mentor, trainer, and coach. She has worked for organizations that include Wells Fargo Bank, Broderbund Software, and The Coaches Training Institute.

This is the second of our series of blogs aimed at helping companies to harvest their retiring employees’ invaluable legacies around succession planning, institutional knowledge transfer, and mentoring pre- and post-retirement.

Let’s focus on succession planning here. It’s one thing to have identified an heir apparent. It’s another for your desired successor to hit the ground running by having a solid mastery of work content and processes, the strategic vision, and by building and/or strengthening key relationships up, down, and over within the organization, and with clients and vendors externally.

This training takes time. The way the process often works now is that an executive has a successor in mind—and has often communicated this possibility to both the person and to senior management. And then it can get kind of vague until the executive announces her impending retirement or transition. This usually happens within a few months of the desired R-date because, historically, the moment you announce your retirement, you become a lame duck and suffer loss of responsibility and recognition. Nobody wants that.

What gets lost in this “business as usual” pattern is the time for the departing executive to ramp her successor fully up to speed while simultaneously ramping down in her own job. Part of ramping down could be providing the pre-retiree with more personal time to dream, explore, and design her next chapter of life so that when the day comes, she is prepared and excited about what’s next instead of feeling like she just fell off a cliff.

Every single day, 10,000 Baby Boomers retire. Many of them need successors to assume their responsibilities as quickly and smoothly as possible. That’s why a thoughtful and gradual succession planning process can be of enormous benefit to the organization, to the successor, and to the retiring leader as she starts her next phase of life. I’d call that a win/win/win situation.

The bigger picture here is that major contributors to your organization have legacies that truly matter. What they know, how they think, their development and mentoring skills, and their well-tended relationships are worth preserving and passing on your organization’s next generation of senior leadership. At the same time, creating a structure wherein a senior leader can explore what’s next in life represents a gift of gratitude to those who have been key players in building the organization’s growth and value.

Let us support your company’s succession process and add value to your executive packages. Contact us for more information.

Caroline MacNeill Hall is Co-Founder of Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating a meaningful next chapter of life. She is President of MAC Advisors, an executive coaching and leadership development company. She’s also senior faculty for the Coaches Training Institute.

Why should a company care about helping a retiring employee create a bridge to their next chapter of life? Isn’t it the employee’s business to handle their own retirement?  They are leaving and won’t be contributors to the company anymore, so why should I as a business owner, Human Resources executive, board member or part of a managing executive team care?

Here’s why….when it comes to a retiring high level employee, the tangible and intangible costs are high. The bad news is that according to a CAP Study, the cost is:

“Up to 213% of annual salary for highly educated executive positions.”  For example, the cost to replace a $500K CEO is $1,065,000.  This doesn’t include the many intangible and often untracked costs.

In the intangible cost category is the loss of institutional knowledge which can impact many areas including processes, employee productivity, and company profits.  Business is done through relationships.  This is a key point that is lost in the day-to-day management of the revenue and expense of a business.  Those relationships are both inside the company, within and between departments, and with outside partners and vendors, impacting productivity, product quality, delivery, customer retention, profits and more.  Multiple studies show that Baby Boomers are retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day.

With more high level employees leaving due to retirement and mid-career transition, this should be of high concern to any company.

The good news is that these costs can be mitigated through proper planning that includes:

• succession planning
• institutional knowledge transfer
• targeted mentoring pre-departure
• post-departure planning that includes mentoring and consulting

Once an action plan is in place that includes the four key topics above, it can be integrated in the day-to-day interactions and operations of a company at low cost. In developing your plan, make sure to incorporate clear outcomes and milestone check-in conversations.  This is such an important topic, we will be devoting several blog posts to it, so stay tuned for more specifics.

Life Reinspired specializes in the next chapter of life transition and planning. Contact us about how we can help you and your company.

Sabrina Roblin is Co-Founder of Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating a meaningful next chapter in life. Sabrina is an experienced executive, mentor, trainer, and coach. She has worked for organizations that include Wells Fargo Bank, Broderbund Software, and The Coaches Training Institute.

As an executive coach, I recommend to my clients that they not signal their plans to retire more than a month or two in advance for fear of losing responsibility and influence when relegated to a “lame duck” role. Over time, though, I’ve come to realize that a swift exit is good for neither the executive nor her/his organization. What’s lost for the business is a firmed-up succession plan, deep mentoring opportunities, and the transfer of institutional knowledge and wisdom. What’s lost for the executive is the time and space to dream about what’s next and make a thoughtful, gradual transition to the next chapter of life. The Life Reinspired Program was designed to add value to both sides of the equation.

Here’s some context: It’s not especially comfortable to broach the subject of retiring with executives in their 60s or early 70s who might be—even should be—thinking about creating a transition plan. And there are legal considerations, too—God forbid HR be accused of “ageism.” Yet Baby Boomer senior executives are not going to stay on the payroll forever. That said, it’s the rare leader who creates enough bandwidth while still working to envision a compelling, fulfilling future post-career. And in the absence of a vision, the prospect of retirement can loom as a daunting series of losses: loss of responsibility and influence, loss of identity, loss of reputation for success, loss of work community, loss of structure, and loss of purpose.

Positioned as a progressive executive perk, the Life Reinspired Program is like voluntary “Outplacement to Retirement,” a.k.a., a compassionate off-ramp from organizational life. Life Reinspired retreats and coaching services provide a structure and thought partners (fellow executives of a certain age or time or career stage) to think through succession planning, who and how to mentor, and the transfer of institutional knowledge. In the program, they’ll also revisit their own values and purpose; begin to redesign relationships with family and friends and identify new relationships to fill the gaps left by losing work associates; envision the next areas of learning, contribution, and influence to explore; and identify Bucket List adventures, experiences, and challenges.

Here’s how the Life Reinspired Program can help HR directors open the conversation about what’s next and offer needed resources for senior leaders. Instead of wondering when 60-something leaders are planning to pull up stakes, HR directors can actively offer this progressive new executive perk–Life Reinspired—as one of a number of enticing executive benefits. In fact, providing an outplacement-like off-ramp to the next chapter of life is one of those factors that gets companies labelled “a best place to work.”

At Life Reinspired, our dream is to create a win/win dynamic for organizations and individuals alike by changing the way Baby Boomer executives leave their careers and the way they arrive in their Encore phase of life. Find out more about our programs.

Caroline MacNeill Hall is Co-Founder of Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating a meaningful next chapter of life. She is President of MAC Advisors, an executive coaching and leadership development company. She’s also senior faculty for the Coaches Training Institute.

Every time I visit my 87-year-old father, he expresses regret that he stopped working at 62. The truth is, though, that he had a high-stress career in the financial markets that demanded long hours. What he really needed was a way to continue to make a meaningful contribution – but on his own terms, not his company’s. To become a mover and shaker in a different way.

I’m coming up on my Medicare birthday in September. My husband retired recently, but I’m terrified at the thought. For one thing, I love my work in executive coaching, leadership development, and culture transformation. It helps people grow themselves, enjoy coming to the office more, and produce amazing results; this is very meaningful to me and totally aligned with my purpose. It also uses the best of me.

Would it be excellent to log more time with my husband, the grandkids, and my Kindle on the beach? Oh my, yes. Would it be good to break a sweat every single day, have frequent Sunset Magazine adventures, and never again grab a few ZZZZZs on a cot in O’Hare due to weather-plagued business trips? Again, yes.

But here’s the scary part: I don’t quite know who I am without working. So I say “yes” to new projects a little (ummm, a lot) too often. I’m nervous. Will my brain and skills atrophy? Will I still get the same respect out there? Will I be bored out of my gourd with grandparenting and big waves? Will I become a monster of selfishness without the opportunity my work affords to contribute to others? Will life become meaningless? Will self-absorption be the A-train to dementia?

This is an extreme, I know. (When I get anxious, horribilizing ensues.) But I’m guessing I’m not alone here. I bet there are many highly successful 60-somethings who are anxious about the loss of identity and contribution that can go hand-in-hand with leaving your big job. Anxiety is no fun, so you just don’t think about this big transition very much—which is easy because you’re so damned busy.

But we Baby Boomers can approach this thing a different way if we take the time to think it through. What if, instead of retiring, we reinspired our lives with new meaning and purpose that included all the things we love to do? What if we capitalized on the opportunity to develop hidden talents and new potential. What if we identified what we care about most and found a way to contribute to it? What if we created structures to pass what we know to those coming up behind us? What if we had astonishingly cool Bucket Lists and started checking off items? What if we deliberately created the perfect balance of play, adventure, contribution, meaning, and hanging with our dear ones—with no contingencies? What if our next chapter—life reinspired—turned out to be the very best chapter of our lives?

I’ve been musing since my 60th birthday on how cool it would be to create a space for successful Baby Boomers to dream and plan their next chapter with thought partner peers. Feet up on the hearth, a glass of Pinot Noir in hand, we’d talk big talk about what’s next, reconnect with values and purpose, and create an inspiring plan. We’d address the physical, psychological, spiritual, and mental elements of transitioning. And we’d bring our life partners into the mix to redesign our relationships for this new phase of life.

Well guess what? It’s happening at last.  With my distinguished partner Sabrina Roblin, we are launching Life Reinspired, a reset lab for successful Baby Boomers contemplating the R-word. Find out more about our upcoming events. If you fit our demographic—successful Baby Boomers who have just retired or soon will and want to make the most of it – come join us and let’s reinspire our lives together!

Remember, the best is yet to come. To learn more, go to LifeReinspired.com.