New Roles, Few Rules: Planning for Purpose Beyond Position

The Life After Leadership Project began interviewing leaders in 2012 about the immense generational transfer of talent that is getting underway, and collected information and reflections from over 600 participants through extensive interviews, surveys and focus groups. New Roles, Few Rules, the third in a series of reports, tells a vivid story about the transition out of formal leadership and into something new for the current generation of long-term nonprofit executive leaders who have built and often founded their organizations. It also offers leaders who are leaving their executive positions a framework of hope for what their new life will look like without sugarcoating some of the risks and decisions along the way.

New Roles, Few Rules explores how leaders plan and land in new roles likely to redefine their familiar notions of leadership as they enter their next stage of life. It begins with success stories and then tracks back to share how hundreds of research participants say they are finding their way. At the end of the report, you can use the starter tool of templates for thinking about getting to a next-stage-of-life transition (“5 Forks to Go”).

At its core, New Roles, Few Rules is about both how individual leaders can plan and make better choices for a successful landing into their own great next stage of life and how all those individuals doing so accumulate into a wave of social and cultural change, including a new context and new opportunities for next generations, communities and the social sector.