While many consider adolescence and the subsequent development of self-awareness as the period when our identity emerges, major life transitions like retirement are also marked by profound identity reformations, as the uncertainty of our next chapters often inspires deep-rooted introspection and self-discovery.

As a semi-retired CEO with a 40-plus-year career in leadership, Mark Lamberti has long witnessed the difficulty some colleagues face psychologically adapting to retirement, often struggling with the losses of corporate life due to an uncultivated personal life or understanding of who they were outside of their career.

“For a high-profile C-Suite executive, retirement is arguably one of the most dramatic life events, comparable to divorce or the loss of a loved one. The loss of the title, status, network, support structures and relationships associated with a senior executive role forces us to ask and answer the existential question ‘Who am I?’. Every executive is best served by finding answers to that question long before retirement,” Mark Lamberti said to Business Insider Africa.

Prevalence of post-retirement identities:

Seeking to establish a better grasp of how CEOs navigate the transition to retirement, Lamberti focused his doctoral thesis from the University of Pretoria’s prestigious Gordon Institute of Business Science, “Exploring Postretirement Role Identity Emergence in Public Company CEOs,” on the ways that executives developed and dealt with their post-retirement identities.

“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,” he commented to Business Mole.

He quickly established that those executives who never embraced meaningful roles and relationships outside of their careers were challenged to find meaning and purpose upon retirement. They became a shadow of their former selves as inspirational leaders. 

“I observed a wide disparity between the postretirement lives of retired public company CEOs. Some seem to be fulfilled, active, alive, well, and contributing. Others were retiring to the coast, playing golf three times a week, and their lives became very small,” Lamberti recalls.

Expanding on his research in a co-authored article recently published in Personnel Review, Lamberti finds that the transition to retirement is often more intense for executives in very senior positions, as they typically experience a total restructuring of their lives where they are faced with the option of either redefining their identities or living in a void of true fulfillment and substance. This restructuring is particularly difficult for CEOs who spent the better part of their lives defined by their careers, totally reliant on their work-role as a source of support, purpose, and fulfillment. 

“Our findings show that CEOs experience a profound void upon retirement that goes beyond the loss of position — it challenges their fundamental sense of self,” Lamberti told Higher Ed Drive. “The transition demands a complete reformation of identity, involving complex psychological and social processes that haven’t been fully understood until now.”

“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.”

Dealing with identity emergence:

To cope with this inevitable post-retirement identity emergence, it’s crucial that before they retire, CEOs identify and nourish their meaningful roles, passions and relationships outside of their careers. While this is often defined as achieving work/life balance, Lamberti posits that this is not about how you allocate your hours and more about how you define the multiple roles that comprise your identity.. “Only when you have clarity on who you are beyond your executive work role and relationships, can you start to define your retiree identity. When you’ve done that, how you allocate your time and your effort and your energies and your focus becomes almost self-evident,” he explains.

“Nurture your identities beyond your business role. “Don’t let your business card define you. Understand who you are in your different roles, as a spouse, as a parent, as a friend, as a sports person, and as a community member. Share the transition with loved family and friends, and seek new purpose and meaning but avoid substitution”

With CEOs often entering retirement with feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and depression, Lamberti suggests that organizations would benefit from taking measures to ease executives into retirement through support of their external identity emergence. 

“The fact is that we are all more than our work role identity,” he asserts. “The strange thing, of course, is that research has shown that job satisfaction and life satisfaction are positively related and causal. If you do have life satisfaction, you’re going to be better at your job and vice versa, provided you don’t let the job bury you. Work role productivity and satisfaction increase when non-work roles are fulfilling.”

“Without this pre-retirement 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 achieve meaning, fulfillment, and happiness in what could be a highly rewarding life phase.”

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