During month of Sept. 2010 & Oct. 2010 I suffered from a weird sickness. Supposed to be some Australian Viral fever which kept me suffering with muscle and joint pain. I was totally out of office for these two months. When I joined back, I had lot to catch up. My juniors handled the work very well during this time and there was hardly any instance where they needed my involvement/decision. But once I joined office, I started feeling odd. These two months had made the team habitual to work without me. I was no longer getting the same importance like earlier. I felt as if these folks don't need me any more.
When I started digging deeper I found there were lot of issues and not so good decisions. But I was not made aware of those. Some different equations were building in the org structure as well. All these things made me uncomfortable somewhere deep inside and I started thinking of my position, future in the department. The two month gap also had kept me away from technology which is my primary skill and I was becoming more of a typical manager than a technocrat manager. I discussed all these things with my wife and the discussion gave me a new paradigm to look at not just what changed in these two months but what happened before that which led to this situation. It was one of those Aha moments that gives you new knowledge about the same things.
