Rescuer or the Rescued?

This happened at work and I thought a lot about privacy of the individuals involved before posting this. I felt there is an important spiritual lesson and hence reached out to them and am publishing it after receiving their consent. 

We were preparing for the quarter end close when a fellow manager pinged me to talk about an urgent development.  One of our colleagues who had moved out of our team about three months ago, was looking to come back.

His new manager had reached out stating that the move wasn’t up to his expectation and wanted to come back to the team which was his home for the last six years. When I had found out about his intention of changing the job, I had discussed it with him about that particular job that he was being interviewed for. In my opinion, it was probably not the best fit for his skills. After consulting a couple of more people, he had made up his mind to give it a try.  He is an excellent person to work with and we supported his aspiration to try out something new.

There is never a dull moment at work as the company, people, process and our systems constantly keep evolving. When I found out about the latest development, I immediately agreed with my colleague that we should support his return to home.

As fate would have it, everything fell in place.  His new manager was keen to make the change happen with immediate effect and open a requisition to look for other candidates.  We also had an open requisition, albeit at a lower level that could be used as an offset to take him back.  The HR, our bosses, availability of the requisitions and releasing managers’ intent were all aligned.  Within a matter of couple of days, all the stakeholders agreed and signed off, and he was back in our team!

I shared this incident with a friend who had experienced an unpleasant tenure in a team for about 18 months before finding an opportunity elsewhere.  He was appreciating the way we supported him and that he should feel grateful that everything worked out so well, in such a short period of time. I said that we are mere instruments of divine grace and that he must have prayed really hard to the divine to make this happen. Otherwise, how is it possible for everything to align at such a lightning speed without causing aggravation to anybody?

Then I also shared the story of someone who was part of my team several years ago.  He recently quit the company and went to a different country to pursue higher education. I was barely in touch with him but sometime before Christmas, he approached me seeking help. His final settlement from the company was a few weeks away and he wanted some money to survive in a new country.  He was going to look for a part time job and was counting on the final settlement to survive until then. I supported him with a couple of installments as the money he was looking for was big and I didn’t want to break investments and ongoing SIP’s. As I write this, it will take another four weeks for the company to complete their process but thankfully, he has found a part time job. I told my friend that he must have prayed to lord Krishna (there is a famous Krishna temple in his home town) and the divine directed him towards me. Otherwise, I was barely in touch with him.  As I know him to be a kind soul and believed it to be a divine intervention, I agreed to help.  Whenever such a thing happens, I remember Swamiji’s post where He shares that we are simply the medium.

Back to quarter end close, everybody in the team got super busy.  One of my colleagues who is critical for the team and who held important responsibilities for the close had a health emergency with a close family member.  The situation was critical, hence he was unable to support even with the best of intentions.  I asked him to focus on his family member and not to worry about the work. There were a few critical activities to be done and also escalations that went to senior leaders in the company.  This is where the person who moved back to our team came to our rescue.  He took care of some of the responsibilities and worked with our partners in IT to resolve the issue which was considered critical for the quarter end. The management team from being the rescuer had turned to be the ones being rescued in less than a week!

I appreciated and acknowledged him for his contributions wholeheartedly.  This experience, is what I consider divine grace. How the prayers are answered by the divine and only through grace can anything align in such a swift manner. It is a constant reminder for me that we are simply unaware of the scale at which divine operates and whatever good we do, it is a mere execution of the divine will.