Your Real Legacy Isn’t on the Org Chart

For leaders stepping away from the work that defined them, the most lasting contribution may be the one walking around in other people's careers.

For most of a career, a leader's calendar answers the question of who they are. There are decisions waiting, people asking for direction, budgets to defend and results to report. Then one day the calendar is empty. The title has gone to someone else, the email slows to a trickle, and the phone no longer rings with problems only you can solve.

Researchers Mark Lamberti and Charlene Lew of the University of Pretoria's Gordon Institute of Business Science interviewed retired chief executives of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange about exactly this moment. Their study, published in Personnel Review, describes what the executives felt as “a profound void upon retirement that goes beyond the loss of position.” It was not the paycheck or the corner office they missed most. It was the sense of mattering.

Lamberti and Lew found that retired leaders typically move through two stages. The first is a liminal period of uncertainty and self-doubt, when the old identity is gone and no new one has formed. The second is an emergence stage, when a new sense of self takes shape. Among the processes that carry people from one stage to the next, one stands out for anyone who has led others: narrative construction, the work of telling yourself a new and truthful story about what your life has amounted to.

This article is about one chapter of that story that many leaders overlook, even though it may be the most durable thing they ever built.