A proven, exciting Retirement planning process for individuals and couples, The Best-Half is a combination of workshops, coaching and personal reflection. It was developed by experienced coaches and educators. For organizations, The Best-Half is a process to be used in succession management especially for transitions and to establish common goals and objectives in the senior phases of a career.

Monday, November 07, 2011

Perhaps I will take a pass on retirement now.


Perhaps I will take a pass on retirement now.

I suspect there are a lot of people who spent the last week re-jigging their retirement horizon: “Hey honey here’s a copy of our recent statement from the Financial Advisor. Good news we don’t need to worry about retirement any time soon!”

Funny - maybe not. There are real consequences for both individuals and organizations. Considering that we already know that “40 somethings” are in the “restless years” and considering that their level of doubt and uncertainty about the future is also revving up, we are approaching “perfect storm” conditions on the horizon.

Watch for: “water cooler” discussions to increase. With so much interest in the financial future people will be trying to make sense of the daily ups and downs of the market. For those investors who are closer to their middle 50’s there will be a lot of need to talk about what this means for them and their families and to understand what is going on.

Watch for: a lot of extra-curricular web surfing to news and financial sites as the focus shifts from your company’s quarterly goals to an hour by hour check-up on personal finances or the market news.

Watch for: minute by minute attention being paid to your company’s stock market results especially if your employee stock purchase plan has encouraged employees to “stock-up.” 

 How do you get people to focus on the job at hand?

Encourage communication. Start a lunch and learn to help people understand what is happening, what the markets are likely to do and how to protect themselves.

Have senior people give a revised “state of the union” on the company including what the fundamentals of the business are and the long term outlook. This should be delivered in writing as well as in person. 70 percent of the job of the CEO is communication. In times of trouble that figure needs to go up not down. People mostly want to be reassured.

For those individuals who are 5 to 10 years away from leaving the organization offer them the opportunity to have a one on one with the pension and benefits people to go over their individual plan and help them prepare to either stay the course or revise their strategy.

Focus on helping others. One of the best ways to forget about your own troubles is focus on someone else’s. Plan something special for United Way that shows your true corporate values are in place and are the foundation of your business.

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