Long-held assumptions about the traditional career path, and its duration, have been overthrown. Increased life expectancy means people entering the workforce today may have as many as five decades of employment ahead of them.
London Business School professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott labelled this phenomenon a “100 year life”. But today’s fiftysomethings did not have too much warning about the changes they would see in their lifetimes. It is relatively new for professionals at or near the peak of their careers to have to recognise they probably still have a lot of living to do long after their main work has been done.
In Changing Gear: Creating the Life You Want After a Full-on Career, published this year, authors Jan Hall and Jon Stokes set out how this next life — or “third age” — might be approached. Hall is a former chief executive and headhunter, and Stokes is a clinical psychologist and leadership coach.
“You spend a lifetime building up ‘muscle’ at work,” Hall says. But at a certain stage it is time to ask: who am I now and how do I find a life which uses some of that muscle? She adds that “it’s not about retirement or easing back”. This time in our lives is an opportunity to flex the old muscles but also to develop new ones.
This is not a simple transition to make. “To make a shift you have to have a picture of the future,” Stokes says. “And you have to take the first step towards that future, take action of some sort,” he adds. “It has to become real. Contemplating the future does not make it happen.”
It can clearly be unsettling to recognise you are entering a new and perhaps very different stage of life. “Power over others seems inexorably to lead to an inflated view of oneself,” the authors write. “The sense of importance that work provides is seductive, and the relative predictability of command-and-control work relationships . . . can become an addictive retreat from any sense of vulnerability.”
How to adapt
How have different executives adapted to entering this third age? Jim Grover is a former group strategy director for Diageo, the international drinks company. In his mid fifties he decided to leave to pursue his true passion: photography. But he did not make a clean break.
“I spent five to six years half the time consulting, half the time trying to be a serious documentary photographer,” he says. “In hindsight, that was a mistake.”
Did it take courage to leave an important corporate role? “It didn’t feel very courageous,” he says. “In fact, my friends at Diageo were saying: ‘Jim, why aren’t you getting on with your life as a photographer?’ I was being encouraged, challenged by them.”
Grover has won awards for his work, and provided the cover image for the paperback edition of the campaigning journalist Amelia Gentleman’s book, The Windrush Betrayal. “I want to tell stories and celebrate everyday life, unsung heroes,” he says. “I’m 62 now. Wish I’d started earlier!”
Theatre director Jude Kelly has never changed down a gear in her life, and she is not about to do that now. But she has moved on from running the South Bank Centre in London after 12 years. One of her current projects, the Women of the World foundation, which puts on festivals and events working towards gender equality, was launched by Kelly at the South Bank in 2010.
“So in a sense I was having an affair with Wow while I was still running the SBC,” she says.
For Kelly, it is crucial to be excited by new artistic challenges. “Trying something new means being courageous, you have got to keep trying to test yourself,” she says. “You just have to keep practising until you die!” She has also found time to launch Smart Purse (with Olga Miler, formerly of UBS), a financial advisory business for women.
Try to plan
For Tim Clark, former senior partner at law firm Slaughter and May, the third age came upon him rather suddenly after seven years at the top of the company.
“I didn’t have a thought-out plan, and I should have had one,” he says. On stepping down from his role, and on the advice of a headhunter, Clark had a series of meetings with chairmen and chief executives — over 60 in total. “You don’t realise how many people you know or can get to meet — it fans out,” he says.
The meetings were fruitful, and in the past 13 years Clark has held a number of rewarding non-executive roles, including on the board of the National Theatre, the Big Yellow storage company and the charity WaterAid, as well as joining the panel of senior advisers at the Chatham House think-tank.
Clark’s advice? “Identify what you don’t want to do as much as what you do want to do,” he says. And for his profession in particular: “Stop thinking of yourself as a lawyer,” he says. “Ask what is it that I can do, what is it in my experience, that I would bring to a board?”
Actor, director and musician Chris Barton left a job as head of drama at a secondary school and has reinvented himself as “CJ”. “CJ is my new identity,” he says. His role at the school had been secure and satisfying but he now feels liberated.
“The Chris of a few years ago might have been a bit disparaging about CJ,” he says. He now plays music in two different bands and is hoping normal theatrical life will resume shortly. “Don’t let yourself be defined by the sequence of professional events or achievements that happened to you,” he advises.
He also has some advice for employers, based on what he has seen as an executive coach — another of his sidelines as an actor/director. “Organisations have a responsibility to get people ready,” he says. “Jobs will come to an end, do you want them to come to an end with everybody tetchy and uncomfortable and miserable, or as a positive move? Perhaps organisations need a kind of ‘succession advocate’.”
When Covid restrictions are finally in the past and people are ready to re-enter the workplace, maybe some will see this as the moment for a rethink and propel themselves enthusiastically into their third age. And who knows what they will discover when they make a change?
It is similar to Grover’s view of photography: “There’s nothing like finally holding a print in your hands. And for some reason, when you do see the print, you always see things in the image you hadn’t fully appreciated before.”