For many senior executives, the years after the top job will last almost as long as the career that came before them. The leaders who treat that time as a new chapter, rather than a slow wind-down, are the ones who tend to make the most of it.
The question usually comes up casually. Picture a CFO about eighteen months from the end of a contract, having coffee with the chair after a board meeting. “So,” the chair asks, “what’s next for you?” The CFO replies “retirement” almost on autopilot, and then hears how hollow the word sounds out loud. There is a date in the diary, but nothing behind it: no plan, no picture of what Monday morning will look like once the job is gone.
Most senior leaders will recognise some version of that moment. Some laugh it off, while others find it quietly nagging at them for months. The physician Curt Diehm captured the feeling in a guest article for Handelsblatt, where he described the “Pensionsloch”, the hole so many managers fear falling into after their final day in office. Americans have their own name for it, “empty-desk syndrome”, which says a lot about how widespread the worry is.
The fear is understandable, but it is built on an idea of retirement that belongs to another era, one in which people stopped working at 65 and had only a handful of years left. That picture no longer fits, and good executive retirement planning starts by putting it aside. For leaders who are between one and five years away from leaving a C-suite or comparable role, the exit date makes far more sense as a starting line than a finish line.
Life after the C-suite can last twenty years
Consider how much time is actually at stake. According to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), a 65-year-old man in Germany can now expect to live another 18 years on average, and a woman of the same age another 21, roughly double what their great-great-grandparents could count on in the 1870s. For an executive who steps down at 62, that adds up to a period longer than many people spend in senior leadership at all. DIE ZEIT put it neatly in the headline of a feature about managers searching for meaning: anyone who is 55 today still has 30 years ahead of them.
No board would approve a twenty-year strategy that consisted of nothing more than a start date, yet that is more or less what happens when “retirement” is the entire plan. Plenty of people have already reached the same conclusion on their own. Destatis reports that one in seven pensioners between 65 and 74 was still in paid work in 2025, and among those who had only just started drawing their pension, the figure was closer to one in five.
What the Aktivrente means for executives in Germany
The government is nudging people in the same direction. Since January 2026, the Aktivrente has allowed employees who have reached the statutory retirement age to earn up to €2,000 a month tax-free from a job subject to social insurance, whether or not they are already drawing a pension, as the Federal Government explains. As the IHK Südthüringen points out, the reform also makes it possible for former employers to bring people back on fixed-term contracts after retirement age, something that used to be blocked.
There is a catch for senior leaders, though. The tax break only applies to salaried employment, and the Federal Government is clear that the self-employed can’t use it. Since many former executives build their next phase around advisory mandates, consulting and interim work, often on a self-employed basis, the Aktivrente is better read as a signal of where things are heading than as a plan most of them will actually use.
The deeper shift is happening in the labour market itself. The German Economic Institute (IW) expects Germany to lose around 4.3 million potential workers by 2036 as the baby boomers retire, because roughly 1.3 million people reach retirement age each year while only about 800,000 younger people arrive to replace them. Experience is quickly becoming one of the scarcer resources in the economy, and companies are beginning to notice.
For executives, retirement is about identity more than income
Much of the international conversation about later-life work focuses on “unretirement”, the growing number of people who stop working and then decide to go back. An AARP survey reported by CNBC found that 7% of American retirees had returned to work within six months, many of them because money was tight.
In the C-suite, the story is usually a different one. Debra Whitman, formerly AARP’s chief public policy officer, has observed that many people return to work because they simply aren’t ready to give up the sense of purpose and identity it gives them, and that comes much closer to what senior leaders experience. Most of them can afford to stop. The harder question is who they are once the title, the team and the packed diary have gone.
Mark Lamberti knows that question from the inside. After running four multinational listed companies, he went on to study it with Charlene Lew of the Gordon Institute of Business Science, interviewing retired CEOs for research published in Personnel Review. As Higher Ed Dive reported, they found that CEOs experience “a profound void upon retirement that goes beyond the loss of position.” The leaders they spoke to typically moved through two stages, beginning with an unsettled in-between period full of uncertainty and self-doubt, and only later reaching a point where a new identity began to take shape.
In an interview with the Cyprus Mail, Lamberti explained that the executives who found this hardest were the ones who had never built meaningful roles and relationships outside their careers. Many were also caught off guard by how much their closest relationships changed once the job came to an end. Executives interviewed for a study at Stellenbosch Business School told similar stories, including the sting of being shown the door “with a small box of possessions” after decades of service, and of losing their networks and support staff almost overnight.
German researchers have reached much the same conclusion. Speaking to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, psychology researcher Simon Schaugg warned that retirement can become an “Identitätsbruch”, a genuine break in identity, for people who have defined themselves through their work, and that the friendships and social ties built before leaving offer the best protection.
None of this means that the transition is bound to be a crisis. What it does mean is that it tends to follow a recognisable pattern, and a pattern is something a well-prepared leader can plan for.
Why seeing retirement as a beginning makes a difference
It would be easy to dismiss framing as a soft issue, but the research suggests it has real effects. In a series of studies of American adults aged 49 to 75, published in Current Psychology, researchers described retirement to one group as a “role exit” and to another as a “role entry”. The second group expected noticeably more positive changes to their sense of self, and people who belonged to more groups outside work, from sports clubs to professional associations, felt more optimistic as well. The same researchers then added an important caveat: when they surveyed people who had already retired, the changes those people had actually experienced were less positive than the ones still-working people expected. Thinking of retirement as a beginning clearly helps, but it works best when there is a real plan behind it.
There may be a health dimension too. Long-running data from the US Health and Retirement Study show that older adults who hold on to a sense of purpose tend to experience slower cognitive decline. The evidence on retirement itself is more mixed, and a systematic review in BMC Geriatrics found only weak signs that retiring speeds up cognitive decline, mostly among people leaving complex, people-focused jobs. That happens to be a fairly good description of most executive roles. The real risk, in other words, isn’t stopping work. It is stopping without anything meaningful to move towards.
What a new beginning looks like after the top job
For most senior leaders, the next chapter doesn’t look like a single new job. It looks more like a carefully chosen mix of activities, and WFA Insights has explored several of the most common combinations.
Many former executives build a portfolio, combining non-executive seats, advisory roles and selected projects in the way described in The Portfolio Executive, while others prefer to keep a solid income on fewer days a week, an approach explored in The 3-Day Week Executive. Board work is a natural draw for people who have spent years running organisations, and The Boardroom Is Getting Older, Not Younger explains why that is creating real openings.
Some leaders look towards ownership. Germany’s Mittelstand succession crisis has left many family businesses searching for interim leaders, investors and successors, and a few executives go a step further and buy a business of their own, as From Corner Office to Ownership describes. Others discover that passing on what they know, through mentoring or teaching, becomes the most rewarding part of the whole chapter, a theme explored in How Senior Leaders Turn Experience Into Legacy.
And for some, the new beginning is built around family, health, creative projects or community. That is every bit as valid a choice, as long as it is a choice rather than something they drift into, which is the balance at the heart of Life and Work: They Go Hand in Hand.
Executive retirement planning: six steps for your final years in role
The leaders who handle this transition well almost always start long before the farewell dinner. Looking across their experiences, six steps come up again and again.
1. Decide what comes next before you set the date.
“Retirement” describes a status rather than a plan. Even a rough working idea, perhaps two board seats, one advisory role and time for a project that has been waiting for a decade, gives the final years in role a sense of direction. WFA’s article on transition readiness looks at how to prepare even when the exit still feels far away.
2. Build a sense of self that doesn’t depend on the title.
People with communities outside the company tend to adjust far more easily, and the best time to invest in those relationships is while the diary is still full, not after it empties. The Title May Not Travel. The Leadership Story Can shows how to turn executive experience into a story that still resonates once the role has gone.
3. Try things out while you still can.
Where governance rules and the employer allow it, taking on a first external mandate, an advisory seat or some guest lecturing can reveal what genuinely energises you, and what doesn’t, long before anything becomes final.
4. Look after your network on purpose.
A surprisingly large part of any executive’s network belongs to the position rather than the person, and it can fade quickly after the exit. What Remains of Your Network When You Leave the Firm explains why it pays to map and widen those relationships early.
5. Give the first year some shape.
The unsettled in-between phase that Lamberti and Lew describe is predictable, which means it can also be shortened. A loose weekly rhythm, a handful of fixed commitments and one project that really matters can make a remarkable difference. Former CFO Georg Mehring-Schlegel offers a candid account of that first quiet stretch in When the Calendar Goes Quiet.
6. Get the finances right, including the fine print.
Decisions about pension timing, severance and lump sums all shape what will be possible later. The German pension insurance notes, for example, that each month of deferred retirement with continued insured employment adds 0.5% to the eventual pension. It is also worth checking early whether any planned activities would qualify for the Aktivrente at all, and anyone weighing up a lump-sum payout may find The Dilemma of the Cash Option useful.
Frequently asked questions about executive retirement
When should senior executives start planning for retirement?
Ideally one to five years before the planned exit, while they are still in role. That window gives them time to test new roles, build relationships outside the company and sort out their finances before their network begins to thin.
Can executives in Germany keep working after reaching retirement age?
Yes. Reaching the statutory retirement age doesn’t automatically end an employment contract, and since 2026, salaried employees past that age can also earn up to €2,000 a month tax-free under the Aktivrente.
Does the Aktivrente apply to consulting or advisory work?
Only when the work is done as an employee subject to social insurance. Self-employed income, including most freelance consulting, is excluded, so it is wise to get tax advice before structuring the next set of roles.
Why do so many executives find retirement hard?
Usually because of identity rather than money. Research on retired CEOs describes a sense of emptiness when the role ends, followed by a period of uncertainty before a new identity forms, and leaders with strong ties and interests outside work tend to get through it more quickly.
What do executives typically do after leaving the C-suite?
Common paths include board and advisory roles, interim management, investing in or taking over businesses, mentoring and teaching, and voluntary work. Many end up combining several of these into a personal portfolio.
A beginning worth planning for
The old idea of retirement imagined a short, quiet ending to a long working life. For most senior leaders today, that picture simply doesn’t hold. They have two decades or more ahead of them, they live in an economy that is running short of experience, and the policy environment is beginning to reward people who keep contributing.
What replaces the old model isn’t just “working longer”. It is a new phase of life that can be shaped with the same care leaders once gave to strategy and succession, grounded in a clear sense of purpose, a deliberate mix of roles and relationships, and the freedom to choose what matters most.
Think back to that CFO having coffee with the chair. The executives who thrive in this next chapter are rarely the ones who held on the longest or left the most abruptly. They are the ones who realised early on that their exit date was really a starting point, and who began shaping what came next while they still had the platform to do it.
WiseForce Advisors supports senior executives, partners and founders through career transitions, with peer-to-peer advice from leaders who have made the move themselves. To start shaping your next chapter, visit wiseforceadvisors.com.
