Having been asked by corporate executives to address soul and spirit at a recent leadership forum, I decided it was time to tackle topic in writing. What prompts use of this term? What do we make of it? Does this appear to be calling for a spiritual revival across world of business?

Here’s an analysis:

Times of upheaval, great change, and chaos call for a re-assessment of values. With a globalized, competitive economy and job security now a once-upon-a-time thing, is it any wonder that we all seek a deeper meaning to what we do and why we do it. As my Canadian colleague Ian Percy describes it, our workplaces are experiencing a “great shuddering”.

Workers are no longer willing to rent themselves to a job to survive to weekend. Rather, this term “soul” implies looking for a deeper purpose behind work other than just gaining a paycheck. It also implies that people want to be identified as whole individuals with brains, hearts, AND souls waiting to be opened within workplace.

From my home office, I can look out and see my garden. It’s loaded with wonderful, terrible sights, sights that mirror much I find in many of our companies. You’d recognize it too.

There are roses speckled with mildew and rust from fog carried on breath of El Nino. Weeds have taken over many patches of dirt, despite fact that I have gone over them with a hula hoe. (For non-gardener, that’s a triangular hoe that saves your back while weeding. Supposedly, you scrub away at ground, loosening weeds –and anything else that stands in way—while leaving good soil behind.) The rogue cherry tomato plant however has taken off … again. Sticky green arms with tiny green/yellow fruit now stretch in all directions. The plant must have been gift from some bird that dropped a seed as it flew to a nest in pine tree. I didn’t think a cherry tomato would grow in that patch of adobe clay. My feathered seed-sower proved me wrong.

What I must do to get my garden back in shape, to make it world class and ready for competitive eye of my next door neighbor, is exactly what every leader must do: seed, feed, and weed. How I perform seeding, feeding, and weeding depends upon season, unexpected turns of nature, and makeup of my garden. Walk with me through my garden and you’ll see analogies for our work world.

1.Consider “season”. In today’s 24-hour, global economy, it would appear that there is no season, anything that distinguishes night from day. Grow, grow. Sell, sell. But smart leader watches sky, reads clouds, and can tell when there are shifts to indicate a new season. Bring products to market at wrong time or introduce an idea without understanding timing and “garden” can quickly resemble a piece of scorched earth.

2.Watch for trends. Read magazines like Executive Excellence, Fast Company and American Demographics. Subscribe to TrendLetter. Explore new planned communities and see how people are choosing to live. Study mail order catalogs. In these latter two areas, you’ll find a move toward “Main Street U.S.A.”. Sure, high-speed connections and technology are placed in home, but new designs incorporate walking paths, close-at-hand stores, and alleyways connecting homes. Technology will be used for information but technology backlash is for creating places of human, real-time interaction. Levenger’s, mail order catalog for unique office and library accessories, features rotary dial phones. The catalog copy reads, “You don’t have to program it!”