How to Prepare for Retirement and Live Your Best Life

Researching How to Prepare for Retirement

Stephanie Creary: Hello, my name is Stephanie Creary, and I’m an Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and I’m delighted to welcome you to today’s episode of the Knowledge at Wharton Leading Diversity at Work podcast series, which is focused on Retiring: Creating a Life That Works For You.

Two very special guests are joining me today. Dr. Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School. Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa received her PhD in psychology from Stanford University. She is renowned for her 45-year research program on how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation. Her current research investigates how people approach and experience the transition to retirement. She is co-author of the new book, Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You, which we’ll discuss today.

Next, we have Dr. Kathy Kram, who is the R.C. Shipley Professor in Management Emerita at Boston University Questrom School of Business. She received her bachelor’s from MIT, her master’s in management from MIT Sloan School of Management, and her Master’s and PhD in organizational psychology at Yale University. She’s renowned for her research on adult development, relational learning, mentoring, peer coaching, and developmental networks. She’s also co-author of the new book, Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You, which we’ll also be discussing today.

Welcome, Teresa and Kathy. I am so honored to have you here with me today for a conversation. The title of your new book is Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You, and this is in a collaboration with professors emeriti Lotte Bailyn, Marcy Crary, and Tim Hall. So Teresa, yes, can you kick us off by telling us a little bit about the motivation for the book? How did this idea emerge?

Teresa Amabile: Well, Stephanie, thank you for having us. We’re really excited to be with you. For me, two things came together. First of all, my previous research program had discovered what I call the progress principle, and it goes like this. Of all the things that can happen in a person’s workday that can give them a great psychological experience, the single most prominent is simply making progress in meaningful work. And as I pondered that discovery, I began to think about what might happen to someone psychologically when they leave their meaningful work behind at the end of their career? And that seemed to me like a great starting point for a new research program.

So that was the initial impetus. But it turned out that in my own life, I was, at that point, starting to think about my own retirement, which I envisioned happening probably sometime in the next 10 years. So I had looked at the literature on retirement, and there really wasn’t a lot of deep, rigorous research illuminating the psychological experiences that people went through during that time. So, you know, that was a personal motivation as well.

Now, through my collaboration with my wonderful co-authors, Kathy and also Lotte and Marcy and Tim, whom you mentioned, the scope of the research really expanded in its initial design phases, because we went beyond the internal psychological experiences to look at the social-relational issues and the life restructuring issues of retiring. So that was the motivation for the research. And the motivation for the book is that we had just spent 10 years doing this research. We wanted to tell people all about it.

Creary: Absolutely. So just a follow up. Who did you write this book for and what, at a high level, do you hope that they will take from it?

Amabile: Oh gosh. Well, we wrote the book primarily for knowledge workers retiring from corporate careers. So for people who had worked in professional roles in corporations, who are thinking about retiring or going through the transition experience or living their early years of retirement. But you know, we’ve talked about this among our team, and we really believe that many of the insights and the suggestions from our research apply to people who are not knowledge workers and who may be retiring from other sectors of the economy. For example, people working manufacturing jobs, people working service jobs. We think that a lot of this really will apply to them, and we hope that they’ll find useful lessons here.

I think the most important thing that we hope people will take from this book is that they will stop fearing retirement, because we found that many people in their working careers, even millennials, even the young people that we interviewed, fear retirement, find it to be a scary prospect. People use metaphors like leaping off a cliff or jumping into the void to describe their sense of what it might be like to end their careers. And you know, we interviewed a lot of older adults in this research, 83 of them, many of them were retired already when we interviewed them. Many of them were in the final years, maybe the final decade of their working careers, but with no immediate plans to retire.

But 14 of those people were about to retire when we were starting our research, and we thought, oh my goodness, wouldn’t it be fabulous if we could follow these people through their transition in a longitudinal way by interviewing them repeatedly as they’re approaching retirement, you know, living those final months or years of their career, going through the transition, and then living their early years of retirement. So these wonderful 14 people agreed to let us do this, and we ended up with over 100 interviews on these amazing 14 people. Over 200 interviews in total, including all the other people that we interviewed.

We call these 14 people our stars because we feature them so prominently. We feature their stories prominently in our writings, in our book. But you know what? All 14 of those people ended up in a reasonably satisfied retirement life. And they all took different routes to it. So don’t be scared. Don’t think that there’s a single right way to do it either.

And we also wrote the book secondarily for people around those who are considering retirement or going through it. You know, family members, friends, colleagues, even counselors, therapists, as we think that the ideas and the suggestions in the book can be helpful to them in helping retiring people. And finally, we wrote it for organizational leaders, because there are a lot of lessons in the book for leaders of organizations. We found that there’s a lot that organizations do that can impact the retirement experience positively or negatively, and the effects, the consequences, are not just for the people who are retiring. There are consequences for the organizations as well. So I’ll stop there, but as you can see, we’re excited to talk about all of this.

Creary: And I’m super excited to hear more of the key insights. I know when I was recruiting the two of you to join this episode today, you know, we’re talking about the myriad ways in which a topic like this can often also get overlooked when we’re talking about diversity broadly. I know in the four years that I’ve been recording these podcasts, I don’t believe we’ve had a single episode where the focus on life stage or age or generation, which I’m sure all of these things get, you know, some attention in the work you’re doing, we haven’t had a single episode where we’ve talked about this.

So I’m so excited that you’re here to help us all have a deeper look into a group of people at a specific life stage whose stories I think deserve to be told just as much as the rest of us. So before we jump more into the insights, Kathy, I want to turn to you, and just talk a little bit more about your team of authors. Obviously, you two are two of the five wonderful scholars who decided to work together. What was it like for you as senior collaborators to do this research and write this book together?

Kathy Kram: Well, I feel honored and privileged that we evolved into a high-functioning team, and we worked for 10 years together. And it all started when Teresa reached out to Tim, because she was looking to formulate a research question at people who are towards the end of their careers, what their life is like, how they navigate through retirement. And Tim said, “Well, I’ll invite Kathy to come.” Because Tim and I both are scholars of life stages and career development, and we acknowledge that there was very little written on people and what they experienced beyond the age of 65 or 70. Because it wasn’t that long ago that there wasn’t 20 or 30 years of life after retirement like there can be today. So we really didn’t know much.

So the three of us had lunch, and Teresa really was looking to create a team that could handle what would become a very big project. We were talking big time. And that’s when we invited Lotte Bailyn, who had done a lifetime of work on family issues and gender issues and life stage development, as well as Marcy Crary, who had also looked at midlife issues and life structure issues.

So we brought five different personal and professional histories into one group, and we worked hard at developing our group. I think that’s an important thing to say. I think as exciting as the results of the study are, it’s also exciting that through reflective processes all through the 10 years, we were able to understand each other’s perspectives, build on them, disagree, and come up with even better interdisciplinary approaches. That’s what made our team so special. So we’re now trying to figure out, how do we let go and move on, you know? But I’m sure we’ll continue to talk about this project, because it’s so meaningful for all of us.

Creary: So I actually remember when you all kicked off this project, because I was in Boston at the time, and there were different, you know, sessions that we had where, you know, brown bags or field research conferences, where each of you would individually talk about this research. And I forgot that it was 10 years ago that you started on this collaboration. It’s just been so wonderful to see how it’s evolved now into this fantastic book. Teresa, I would love to get your perspective on some of this.

Amabile: You know, I just wanted to add one little thing to what Kathy said. And I want to respond to what you just said. Honestly, those brown bag sessions where the research group that you were part of, Stephanie, gave us feedback on our research design and how to make sense of the initial data we were seeing. Those were valuable, weren’t they, Kathy?

Kram: Yes, absolutely.

Amabile: Really, wonderfully helpful. And I wanted to add a little something to what Kathy said about our team. Over these past 10 years, we’ve become really good friends. I count Kathy now as one of my dearest friends, and I had never met her before that lunch with Tim and Lotte.

Creary: Wow, really?

Kram: Yeah. We knew of each other.

Amabile: I knew of her work. I knew of her work, yeah.

Creary: Yeah, I find that fascinating. So again, had been in Boston for — so I’ve lived in Boston three times, the first time for six years, which was not in this business school community that I became part of in the second stint in Boston. I was there for 10 years, from 2005 to 2015 and that’s when I met all of you all. And you know, as a PhD student, I bounced around from institution — that was the lovely thing about Boston, is that people’s communities, research development communities, were open to everyone in ways that I’ve actually never seen in many academic cities or towns.

But nonetheless, as I remember bouncing around to these different groups. So because I feel like I knew all of you, that you must have known each other. So that’s new learning for me. But I think the one thing that I want to make sure that our listeners hear, because you two are way too humble to even say this, but this is not just a team of five people working together, this is a team of five academic powerhouses who are renowned in their own respective research streams.

And so the fact that we have these five really — you know, these academic rock stars coming together for 10 years, working together and producing something like this, that’s not something that typically happens. So I don’t want that to get lost in our conversation around, yes, you all are friends, and we think it’s great, but I think it’s a testament to true collaboration and willingness to work together as part of a diverse team that doesn’t know it’s going to produce at the end of the day. But I think what you’ve produced is something that’s really, really quite wonderful.

So let me just ask one more question before we dive into some of the insights of the book. Just follow up for Kathy. As you all embarked on this research, were there any specific myths or misconceptions that you were trying to challenge about retirement as a life stage, or what it means to retire in general?

Kram: I think we all started as curious academics with a thought that if we were successful at this work, we would find out what’s the right way to retire. That’s a myth that we brought in. If we interviewed enough people, we would see which way worked and which way didn’t work. And instead, what we found was there really is no one right way. Some people continue working part time, some people leave work immediately behind and jump into other things they want to do. But there’s no prescription.

What we did come up with instead is the idea that a person needs to examine his or her own values and priorities and needs, which tend to shift over the life course. And to do that, and really ask, is the life structure I’m in right now aligned with what I want and need in my life. That’s the big question for people. And what we learned are there are different ways to answer that question, and each person will have a unique answer, depending on their history, their current priorities, vision for the future.

Case Studies on the Retirement Journey

Creary: Okay, all right. So let’s unpack some of what we’ve generated so far. Coming back to you, Teresa. What are some of the key insights that you had while undertaking this research? As you know, a hallmark of interestingness in academic research is about surprises and things that might feel surprising. So you know, was there something that was surprising to you as you undertook this research?

Amabile: Well, I just want to mention one that just struck me as Kathy was talking. We busted the myth that this is a time of decline and distancing from life. This is a time of vital engagement in life for almost everyone that we interviewed. We interviewed 120 people, 83 of them older adults at some stage of this. And that breaks the stereotype of aging, which I think is still out there. I think older adults tend to get marginalized in the workplace, and after they’ve retired, there are very negative associations to the word retiree, because we did that in our interviews. We did a little word association thing, and people had associations like old, disabled, out to pasture. So that’s just wrong.

So that’s at the highest level, I guess, that’s a big insight. Second big insight I want to mention is that retiring actually takes work. So stopping working does take a different kind of work. It can be very enjoyable. It can be fun and engaging work, but it does take knowledge and attention and effort to have a smooth transition to a satisfying retirement life. In fact, we discovered four developmental tasks that people have to engage in as they’re retiring, and you can’t avoid these tasks if you do want to have a satisfying retirement life.

The first one is simply deciding how and when to retire. The second task is detaching from work, of course, tangibly, you know, wrapping up your projects, handing off things. But psychologically detaching from your work, which we discovered is way more difficult for many of us. The third task is exploring and experimenting with new elements of your life, new context, activities, relationships, places to spend your time as you build a provisional retirement life in those early months or early years.

And the fourth task is figuring out which of those elements from the provisional retirement life seem to suit you well, as Kathy was talking about, suit the person you are now, your identities, your values, your priorities, your needs. Which of — which elements of that new life seem most suitable for you and which seem viable for the foreseeable future. And settling into a relatively stable retirement life. That’s really the fourth task, the fourth phase, if you will.

They don’t necessarily happen in that sequence, and sometimes people are still detaching from their work psychologically, even as they’re consolidating a retirement life. But that set of four tasks showed up, really, in every story. So I think that that’s a big one. And as Kathy said, there is no one right way to do it. We found so many different approaches to engaging in these four tasks that can work — different ways, that can actually work.

So we had one person that we call Irene, who went from working incredibly long hours, full time job in a prominent tech firm. She retired, and the next day she didn’t have any work in her life at all. And she reoriented her focus toward moving and renovating the vacation home she and her husband had had as their now permanent residence, engaging a whole lot more with friends and family that she felt she really had been wanting more time with, exploring new activities. So that was her way of doing it.

A guy that we call Bob, by contrast, had a more gradual transition. He reduced his work week by one day a week. And after living in that, to him, it was a semi-retirement mode for several months. He decided, okay, I’m ready to fully retire. And when he did that, he didn’t change much about his life. He didn’t move, didn’t take on new activities. He continued engagement with friends and family and church. He did add some caregiving to his toddler grandson, which he loved. And he just waited to see what would emerge. And soon, invitations came in from his church community for him to step up into some new roles there, take on some important jobs in the church governance. And he was very happy to do that. A very different path from Irene’s, but it worked for him.

And there was a guy called — that we called Walter, who went from working full time one week, retiring, and then the next week starting a part time job. Totally different from what he had done. He had been an engineer in a tech firm. And he went from that to working part time in a cycling shop, because he was an avid cyclist. He wanted something to structure his week. So he was working, I think, three days a week in this shop, and his wife had asked him to find something else to do rather than hang around the house the whole time. So he foresaw this, he got the job lined up before he retired, and he was having a ball. All three of these people, within the first year after they retired, had consolidated a really satisfying retirement life for themselves.

Creary: So something came up for me as you were talking, Teresa, and it was — it won’t be surprising to you that I thought about identity, and certainly thought about, you know, your population of people you’re studying, knowledge workers in corporate organizations who spend, as we know from the research that you’ve done and others, that they spend a considerable amount of their hours, their time in these formative years, invested mostly in the tasks, in relationships associated with this work identity.

Maybe, you know, for some people, if they’ve stayed at that institution for a long time, right, it becomes — they not only become identified with the job, but also the organization. And now it’s trying to find some ways to emotionally, cognitively, physically attach to something else. And it sounds like you get a great number of stories around some people forming those attachments with family, and some of them forming it with, like, another type of a hobby that becomes a source of employment. Kathy, I would love to get some of your perspective on any other stories that you thought were interesting.

Kram: Yeah, you’re absolutely accurate, Stephanie, that the shift in identity that’s necessary when people decide they want to move out of their full-time job is so key to what we observe. The task of detaching is so unique. And some people, it took five years, some people, it was easy, as Teresa showed. I think about the fact that some people, and one I think of in particular we call Simon, he had so many activities in his life. Although he loved his work, he also had a strong identity as a father. He loved tending his garden and growing vegetables. He was very active in his church. He was not the kind of professional that invested all of himself into work the way so many of our others did.

So he actually had to wait for a lawsuit to resolve regarding a former marriage to get finances worked out, and as soon as that was done, he was out the door. He never looked back. His wife, and we found this in a lot of our cases, spouses can be very important. And Simon’s wife had retired a few years earlier, and she encouraged him, don’t rush into anything. Just see what you have going on, what you enjoy. Give yourself a year. Because he’s such a doer and a problem solver.

He might have done what I did, which was to jump into a new research project that would take me — take my time for the next 10 years. But he didn’t, and he waited, and during that reflective period, he figured out and ended up, nine months later, taking up a volunteer job at an organization to help the underserved regarding house maintenance and furniture building and so on. And he said in our last interview, “All the talents I used at work I’m now using in this context.”

And that is what we called identity bridging. And we had a lot of people in our sample, like the one that Teresa mentioned, who went to work for the bicycling company. You know, they find other activities which give them purpose and meaning, the way the work identity had done for so many years. So that’s one example. Other people had more difficulty because they didn’t have the other activities and relationships. And so the idea of letting go of work —

We had a woman who had a really hard time, Margaret. Now, she had, in addition, unique circumstances. She was not married, like our other 14 — 13 stars were. She had the beginnings of a chronic illness. She had no children, so — and she was one of our strongest introverts. We actually collected personality data and other affective data on our participants. So for her, the prospect of being a couch potato when she let go of work was a really negative image, and yet she was very contented just being at home with her knitting and her cats and her garden and her dog. But she realized through self-reflection that she was isolated, and she started building new activities and relationships, at the gym, doing other kinds of spiritual practices, volunteering for hospice, and she built quite a nice life structure for herself. But as you see, Simon had it all there when he started, and Margaret started with very little in terms of post-retirement life structure.

Why Do People Fear Retirement?

Creary: So what this reminds me of is research on identity transitions. And I think what came up for me particular was the Herminia Ibarra and Roxana Barbulescu wrote, which really was Academy of Management Review piece in 2010, and it was looking at like macro role transitions, but it was, how do you — it’s like a narrative identity logic flowing through the paper. And it’s how do you narrate your cross-organization or your inter-organizational move?

So let’s say you quit one job, or you get fired and you get hired at another job. How do you story yourself in a way to help make sense? And so this idea, I believe you said it was Simon, of saying these are transferable skills, if you will, is something that’s common when people move between organizations, especially as fully employed workers. I see like some nice overlap. I also see some nice distinctions there, but sort of that’s what was sparked for me as you were telling his story.

Kram: Well, yeah, and just in response to what you said, the transition and how people navigate it, it’s so unique to the individual because of what they bring to that task, the four tasks actually. You know, for some it’s easy to make the decision, for others, it’s not. But either way, they then have the task of detaching and figuring out a new life structure. And depending on what you bring to those tasks, it will take different kinds of psychological work, which is — that was our goal, was to get at the psychological work underneath the transition journey. And I think we achieved that goal.

Creary: So maybe call me naive, or maybe it’s just because of where I am at my mid-career stage. I was — actually was surprised to hear you say that some people fear retirement and some people resist retirement, because I’m actually looking forward to retirement, which is not going to happen for some decades from now. Because I’m thinking about, oh, you know — and again, could be naive. I’m going to get on a plane, I’m going to travel the world, no one has to like know where I am. So I’m just curious about the people who fear and/or resist retiring, Teresa. What did you learn about sort of what was underneath some of this — these concerns or this resistance?

Amabile: It was different for the different generations, Stephanie. So the older adults who were still working had not — but knew that they were approaching retirement within the next few years, just felt that there was a lot unknown about what life on the other side would be. So there was a lot of uncertainty about that. And their word associations — we made a word cloud out of their word associations to the word retirement, and the more prominent words were things like scary, unknown, far away. Even though they knew it was approaching, they kept thinking of it. “Oh, I’m not going to spend too much time on it, it’s far away.” Or never, they said the word never, many of them. “I’m not going to do this, I can’t think about it.”

And, of course, others said words like freedom and happiness and relaxation. It wasn’t all negative. But we were astonished by the degree of fright and fear around this. For the millennials in the study, the more prominent, by far, the most prominent word association was money worries, or some synonym. Not surprisingly, especially in this country, with uncertainties about Social Security and job security. There was a lot of concern about that. But there was also the sense that there was — it was a huge unknown for them.

They also had positive stereotypes, but there was a lot of negativity. You know, remember Irene, whom I mentioned, who moved and renovated the vacation home and got engaged in all these new activities? She had a terrible time making the decision to retire. She didn’t even think that she identified that closely with her work, because we asked these questions in the interview. But she struggled with that decision, if you can believe it, for four years. She kept thinking she was going to retire, because she wasn’t liking the direction that the corporate culture was going, she was finding it more difficult to help her team get great work done in this new organizational environment.

She loved her team and she really respected the organization, but she just — she used the words uphill battle to describe her experience of working. And there were so many other things she wanted, like travel. You talked about travel. She wanted to do more travel. She wanted to spend more time with the friends that she loved, the family members that she loved. She wanted to try her hand at art and writing, something that had been in the back of her mind for years. So she was in this crazy push-pull thing for four years. She’d tiptoe up to the decision, and then she’d back off for another year. Once she actually made the decision, she said, “I walked away and never looked back.”

Amabile: And when we asked her, “Why do you think it was so hard for you to make that decision?” She said, “People do respect you when you’re working and after, maybe not so much.” So that’s another piece of identity, right? And it has to do with your social identity, your identity that you present to others, that you imagine others have of you.

Preparing for Retirement while Writing the Book

Creary: Yeah. So Kathy, would love if you had any reactions to the things that Teresa is sharing here. But I also want to turn this back to the personal, to you all. Again, I’ve described you as academic powerhouses, rock stars, superstars. All these words that we can use to explain that your contributions to our field have been immense, to your institutions, of which all five of you were at your respective institutions for some time, right? You’re identified with those institutions. I identify you as part of the institution. Whether you like it or not, you, to me, are the institutions that you created, the positive sides of these institutions. And so I can imagine that things came up for you, emerged for you as you were doing this work and reflecting on your own retirement processes. Can you speak about doing research on something that you were experiencing yourself while this research was underway? Kathy, we’ll start with you.

Kram: Yeah, I mean, you know, Steph, that I throughout my career, I’ve always been attracted to study phenomenon that are close to me, that I’m experiencing. So I studied mentoring when I was young, because I was seeking mentorship for my own growth and development. And as my life went on, I moved to looking at peer relationships and other kinds of relationships that become essential later throughout the life course. And this study happened to come to us, as Teresa noted, when I was also thinking about retirement.

In fact, in 2014 when we first met, I was already in a — what do you call it? A transition period of not — I was teaching less than full time. So I was trying out what it was like. And I did not realize until we started doing these interviews how difficult the identity transition from a professor, a chair professor at Boston University, to simply Kathy Kram, who has interests and pursues questions with curiosity.

But I think that was one of the gems of this research. We were all going through our own transitions very uniquely. I mean, I ended up retiring two years before Tim, who had been my early career mentor, and he’s 10 years older than me, and it felt kind of crazy to me. In fact, I almost was worried about how he was going to react. But in fact, we each have our own story. And we examined our stories as we went along.

And I think towards the end, I’ll mention this now, but I think towards the end, each of us did have a better understanding of the challenges that we were facing. And because we observed so many others in our interviews, we could bring the insights we developed on our interviewees to our own experience. So it was very rich. I am much more patient today. When I retired, I thought, I’m studying retirement, I should have this figured out. And it actually — the discernment came as we did the research and developed our understanding of others. I could then apply it to myself.

Creary: So as — you know, Teresa, I’m going to ask you the same question, but as Kathy, you know, finishes what this was like for her personally, I’m going to share with each of you how un-retired I feel that each of you is relative to the role that you played in my life. So Kathy, during your retiring or retirement period, you’ve not only gotten on Zoom with me to talk through an early stage paper, as I was trying to figure out what was the contribution of this work relative to your own work, but we also belong to a group positive relationships at work community, and you’re like this active participant, like responding and encouraging all these junior scholars and mid-career scholars who are trying to do work that I think complements your own but also builds on your own, and I see you in that, in that feed, that group quite often.

I also see you on Facebook quite often, and I think about your son and your daughter-in-law, and all the work that they’re doing on Broadway, and you’re just being such a fantastic champion for them and the things that are accomplishing. So again, demystifying the idea that once one leaves one’s institution, that they’re at home watching soap operas. That I don’t think you’re doing. If you are, you have a lot of time on your hands. But it seems to me like you’re really busy and contributing with such amazing things. Teresa, so how about your story? What is this — how does this feel as you were talking about this topic, doing research on this topic, which was something that you were experiencing yourself?

Amabile: Partly, I was really nervous that I would allow my own preconceptions about retirement, or my own experiences, to somehow bias the interpretation, even the questions that I was asking, the way I was asking them in the interviews, or my interpretation of what I was seeing in the data. And I know that my colleagues felt the same way, but — so we set up guardrails for ourselves. We had regular meetings where we discussed — we listened to each other’s interviews or read the transcripts of each other’s interviews, gave each other feedback. If we felt we were straying a little bit and interjecting our own experience too much into it.

I believe that we did that effectively. We helped each other interpret what we were reading in these interviews, because sometimes I would be baffled by something that an interviewee had said, but always, someone else on the team, at least one person, would have had an experience themselves or someone close to them, where they could interpret what was going on for this person, and that was extremely helpful.

The other thing is, I think we had an advantage, because we were age mates, more or less. Stage-of-life mates to the people we were interviewing. We had our research associates interview the younger participants in our study. So we felt that age matching engendered a lot more trust with the people we were interviewing. And I personally gained so much from seeing these stories, these different paths. It helped me a lot.

For example, my husband and I, when I was transitioning to retirement, we were thinking about moving 100 miles away from our home, a different part of the state, to be close to our daughter and her family. We only have one child, and we thought, oh wow, we’d love to be more part of their lives and have them more part of ours. But this one participant named Lawrence had had a very difficult experience after he and his wife made a move to be near one of their kids and his family as they retired. They moved 1,000 miles away to a place they had very little acquaintance with, and they didn’t really engage with the community there, except for this little nuclear family they were going toward.

And, wow, some upheavals there led to a very, very difficult experience for them. And I took that as a cautionary tale, and it really informed what Steve and I did as we were considering making them, which we did make six years ago, and it worked out extremely well for us. It has worked out well. So thank you for asking that.

Creary: Absolutely. And so Teresa, I think it was probably January ’22, I received this lovely note from you via email, that told me that you had nominated me for a fellowship at Harvard Business School for the Institute for Business in Global Society. And the fellowship was focused on, you know, racial equity and diversity, equity, inclusion, people who study these things. And I knew Teresa clearly, like everybody knows Teresa, but I didn’t know, Teresa, that you knew me well enough to actually nominate me for this, this wonderful, amazing opportunity, which gave me a year and a half to work on my own research.

And I’m thinking, I actually didn’t know you were retired at the time because you were so active, and still nominating junior scholars for amazing scholarly opportunities. And so I think that’s definitely one of the things that I remember about you, and I think about you, and I think about what retirement can look like, particularly as an academic, is still understanding that, you know, you play a role in the future of the academy, in the future of science, in equity and opportunity. And I think as you still continue to commit yourself to that, you know, to me, it’s so important to know that you don’t have to give that up. And as a matter of fact, I don’t know where I would be if you actually had given that up at the time.

So it speaks to, we might not need to engage in these roles full time, but when we do them some of the time, or the parts of the roles that we still care about, how much we can still make a meaningful impact on someone else’s life. And I think that when I — from what I know about the two of you is that’s been a critical part of your identity as scholars. So I’m quite grateful that you all haven’t taken quite literally the notion of, you know, couch potato retirement stereotype, so — and you’ve continued to engage, at least in the world that we share.

So I want to, before we close, just get to the advice pieces here. I’ll start with Teresa and go back to Kathy. As you think about retiring, and particularly for older employees, what advice do you have for older employees, and perhaps their family members and friends, or the organizations they’re working for, when we think about advice about retiring?

Amabile: Well, first of all, learn about these four tasks of retiring. Really learn about what’s involved in each of them, the challenges and the great things, the opportunities that arise as you go through each of these, and think about how you can meet those challenges with energy, and reap those joys. We discovered what we call the four A’s as being really important to people in making a good transition, as having a smooth transition to a satisfying retirement life that works for them, unique to them.

The first A is alignment. You need to work toward alignment between who you are now, not your vision of who you used to be, but now, and what your life is now. And maybe exercise agency, the second A, to tweak something about your life, or maybe make a major change, or even something about yourself, to get better alignment between yourself and your life structure. And for that you need the third A, which is awareness. Try to develop better self-awareness, and awareness of your life structure, and what are the dynamics within it that might be affecting you negatively or positively. And finally, because there are oh so many things in life that we cannot control, we need to develop adaptability. And we found that the people in our study who were able to adapt to positive and negative things that happened in their life that they had no control over, those people were able to do better through this transition.

Creary: Thank you, Teresa. Kathy, your thoughts, your advice for retiring.

Kram: Yeah, what Teresa said just reinforces the fact that I would like people to know the process of retiring is not just a decision to retire, but it’s a journey that takes time. And so being patient with one’s self is very important. I wanted to have — I know from my own experience, I wanted to have it all figured out. And honestly, I feel like I’m entering yet another stage of retirement now that the book project is done. So the work is never done, you know? The psychological work. But if you use the four tasks as a structure for creating alignment, it really works well.

And another thing is not do it alone. We found that relationships are really very important. Of course, the spousal relationship is very important. And we found there were people who needed to negotiate, navigate, really understand each other, and certainly, if you’re beginning on this journey, it really is useful to create a dialogue with your spouse, whether he or she is retired or still working. And then all the other people who can also be helpful, like former colleagues at work, friends, people in your church community. There is no reason to have to go through this journey alone. And we found, I think, for almost everyone, that relationships were critical in helping one to detach and to create the new life structure.

Creary: Absolutely. Well, you know, this has been — I knew this was going to be a great conversation. This is a fantastic conversation. I’m so fortunate, I think, to have had both of you as, you know, part of my community, as senior scholars, but also in different ways, as mentors, as supporters, as champions. And then your willingness to come on the Leading Diversity at Work podcast series to talk about your latest innovative piece of scholarship. I love that it’s a book. I love that the five of you have finally brought this to us, and look for it, I believe it comes out in October, right?

Amabile: October 2, yeah.

Creary: October 2. You can pre-order it. I already have. I’m looking forward to reading it. And so I appreciate your openness to talking about this topic that is both scholarly and personal for you. I appreciate your willingness to share that with our audience. And that you continue to see yourselves as part of these communities, coming in whenever you want to, dipping out whenever you want to, because I think those of us who have benefited from your support for all these years, we miss you, and so we like seeing you.

So thank you for continuing to engage with us in the ways that you are. Thank you for joining me today. Thanks for sharing your insights and your expertise. So that’s all for today. We appreciate the audience for joining us and listening to this episode of the Knowledge at Wharton Leading Diversity at Work podcast series. Goodbye for now. Thank you.