Dick DeVos is soaring in retirement. In 2010, the past leader of direct-selling giant Amway combined his passions for flying and education to found the West Michigan Aviation Academy, an airport-based four-year high school—just one of the former company president’s many post-career pursuits. “We have 600 students today,” DeVos explains, “and provide kids with a great education strong in aviation, robotics and engineering.” Many students advance to flying solo and earning their pilot’s licenses, opening up multiple career opportunities.
Dick is a great example of a former family business leader who has found fulfillment post-retirement by using his interests to identify and work on meaningful projects. While many former leaders have followed similar paths, others report much less positive post-work experiences as they struggle with loss of identity and meaning. “I had observed people retiring … and then a year later they would drop dead and that was not how I wanted things to go,” says Frank Schurz , former CEO of Schurz Communications , which had hundreds of millions in revenue at its peak. Inspired by these observations to think ahead, Frank pursued passions for fishing and water-fowl hunting while still working. “I figured once you retire you can convert this hobby into a passion and then eventually to a total compulsion,” he continues. That’s exactly what he did, from becoming part owner of a fishing lodge to joining several conservation organizations, making great friends along the way.
There are countless other positive and negative examples of family business leaders making the transition to post-work life. This book is about how better to make that change, with the goal of not just letting go of the leadership role that likely occupied decades of your life, but of finding true fulfillment in “life after work.” Success with this transition requires proactive planning for multiple dimensions of your “personal continuity,” as we’ll discuss.
In many ways, the first step to planning ahead is to understand that any leadership transition happens within multiple systems, and thus represents more than a one-time, clearly defined event.
What Succession Planning Misses
A leader’s transition out of a family firm is much more than a one-time succession , or a handover between the outgoing and incoming leader. As Jim Ethier , former chairman and CEO of Bush Brothers & Company, the Tennessee-based food-processing business famous for its baked beans, states, “I wanted to build an organization. Now I am satisfied that it is done, and I have the right people in place.”
Jim went on to speak about the many changes he had championed in the business and its governance, including helping the family develop an ownership vision for the future, creating governance processes and systems that would support that vision, and ensuring family members were appropriately groomed and challenged to be able to effectively step into key leadership roles.
Jim’s
efforts speak to the idea that a family business
is not just a business but a highly complex
system. In fact, those of us who live and study family enterprise are always deepening our understanding of how complicated this system can be, with overlapping sub-systems related to family, business, and governance. One outcome of our growing appreciation for
family business’s complexity has been a shift in describing “succession planning” more as “continuity planning.” This seemingly subtle change reflects our realization that leadership transition affects much more than the two individuals changing roles—it’s never just about
one succession—and that this top-level change will have strong impact on the continuity and functioning of the entire enterprise and all its constituents, or stakeholders.
1 Moreover, as “continuity” has an active and positive tone, it combats the resistance many
CEOs have to talking about retirement or “succession,” which feels to some like a thinly veiled term for their imminent departure.
Part of the challenge is that while there’s a lot of thinking on how family business systems and stakeholders may need to evolve to support the continuity of the enterprising family and operating business,2 there’s little consideration of the personal continuity of a leader transitioning out of their role. Many books and articles have addressed the topic of the CEO’s resistance to “letting go,” but almost nothing has been said about how these individuals might continue to contribute in a meaningful way once they’ve exited business leadership, creating benefits not only for themselves but also their family, business, and broader community.
Another way to think about this important issue is to ask: Why would healthy, capable and driven people let go of a powerful role they enjoy if they have nothing to move toward afterward? Indeed, this book’s premise is that lack of clarity or options for meaningful post-CEO roles is a major factor in succession struggles, and can have wider-reaching negative consequences on the family, business, and other systems in which the departing leader is based.
The good news is that retiring leaders can use their passions—including those discovered while running
their family business—to guide their post-career decisions and activities, as we’ll discuss at length later in the book. The words of Phil Clemens, former
CEO of
Pennsylvania-based Clemens Family Corporation , which holds food businesses including Hatfield Quality Meats, exemplify this idea.
His post-work life involves serving on the boards of several organizations, including corporations, non-profits, and Christian colleges.
What the Research Found
My interest in the topic of personal continuity may have originated in my observations of my grandfathers’ histories (see Preface), but has deepened considerably through my work with family businesses and the research I pursued on retiring family business CEOs for my doctoral thesis in psychology.3 My study, which followed retiring family business leaders over three years, found that leaders with a greater capacity for reengagement—defined as the ability to find and commit to new goals when a valued goal must be abandoned (see Chapter 4 for more details)—had taken more concrete steps toward retirement planning across domains than those for whom reengagement was inherently more difficult. Unsurprisingly, concrete planning by the outgoing CEO also led to better outcomes for the business.
My study also found that outgoing CEOs felt like they were conceding or sharing more authority than successors felt they were gaining. The classic example of this is the “retiring” CEO who feels that they are increasingly releasing control by spending more time in Florida or some other sunny locale, away from the business, while still calling in to work daily, countering decisions the new leadership team has made, and actively directing team members. Not surprisingly, rising successors in this context do not feel they have much in the way of real, new authority, so they tend to describe the “shift” in authority very differently than the outgoing leader would. These differences in perception can clearly be sources of conflict. The implication of this is that understanding the challenge and struggling with the question of what comes next for the departing leader may build empathy and better outcomes for everyone in the system.
Another interesting result from the study was that incumbent leaders who have an easier time disengaging, or letting go, are less likely to escalate commitment to their leadership role in the face of declining business performance, which helps them make the transition to post-work life. Not surprisingly, I also found a link between active planning for retirement and the ability to commit to new goals. Like any new, important undertaking, creating a fulfilling post-work life needs some level of intentional planning.
In the interviews for this book, when I asked retired CEOs about their non-work-related commitments , it was evident that strong passions and outside interests created a...
