The color RED is one of the most used colors in our business environments, actually there are just a few colors being used from the color spectrum.

Most of the time, in our business communications, we use RED color in a negative way, it usually reflects that a business KPI is “going wrong” or “something is bad”. If we explore the meaning of the color RED, we can find that it is associated with a lot of positive things too, that is why I think we use colors at work in a very limiting way.

The meaning of the color RED has multiples aspects, of course one of them is related to staying alert, feeling secure and having our basic needs covered. But the RED color has additional meanings that we don’t usually explore in professional settings.

The color RED is associated with passion, being passionate about what you do, the inner motivation that moves you forward to take action, accomplish tasks and get your work done. That is why the color RED is related to our vital energy, the one that gets us moving every day. RED is also connected with our capability to have courage to solve issues at hand.

Finally the color RED connects us with Mother Earth and nature along with those moments of reflection and silence we can spend there.

As you can see the way we use the color RED at work is very limiting and sometimes it is just only negative. Even if we would like to keep using RED color as an alert, what could happen with our teams, if instead of seeing a RED KPI labeled as “wrong or bad”, we encourage the team to see it as an “opportunity to learn”, explore and come up with new ideas on solving an issue. What could happen, if we see RED color as a starting point to spark creativity in your team.

🌱 How could we resignify the way we use the color RED at work? 🌱

Now that you know more about the full meaning of the color RED, we can start exploring how to use it to express your feelings, identify your talents, describe roles in a team and the team’s mission in an organization.

A new CREATIVE COACHING TIME starts, it is your turn now. When using the color RED to express your feelings, you can ask yourself questions like these:
🌱 Are all your needs cover? (For example: Am I sleeping well?)
🌱 How is your vital energy today?
🌱 How frequently do you connect with nature?

I invite you to take some time and response these questions today. You can rate yourself quickly as Low and High and come up with how RED you feel today. Are you Low? Are you High? Is there any RED aspect you would like to explore more?

When using the color RED to identify or describe your talents, you can ask yourself the following questions:
🌱 Do you like to take action and get things done? Are you a Doer?
🌱 Do you have passion in what you do?
🌱 How is your profession fulling you?
🌱 Do you like to handle issues and solve problems at work?
🌱 How RED are you?

These aspects of the RED color helps you to identify your talents, the ones in our teams, and to spot RED members in your group.

Another way we can use colors for it is by identifying leadership behaviors. A leader should usually have multiples colors and use them depending on the situation at hand. A RED Leader is the one who might represents most of the meanings of RED.

A RED Leader sees opportunities to learn in a “wrong RED KPI”. She or he motivates the team instead of punishing them when something goes RED, they create a safe environment for mistakes, where nothing is dangerous. They go even further and do small celebrations when something goes RED instead of stressful status and command and control meetings with executives.

This kind of leaders elevates the vital energy of the other person in each interaction through motivation. They usually choose to be a leader not for a social or professional status, but for a real passion to help others to grow.

A new CREATIVE COACHING TIME starts, it is your turn now:
🌱 How do you act when you receive a RED KPI or you are under pressure?
🌱 How do you act when something goes wrong at work?
🌱 How do you act when you or someone in your team makes a mistake?
🌱 How RED are you as a leader today? (Leader of a team, or leader of your own life)
🌱 And How RED would you like to be in the future?

As we talked before, we can also use colors to describe the characteristics of a Team. The color RED gets represented in it, when we can identify behaviors in some of its members. In order to spot those RED sparks you might look for team members who loves to do the work, the more difficult the task the better for them. They are passionated about solving issues, don’t get afraid when something goes wrong and feel energized when something is accomplished. These members spark motivation through others in each interaction and sees opportunities in learning all the time.

A RED Team gets things done and brings the whole group moving forward. They are the vital energy of a team, the spark you want in a multicolored team. A RED team is a subgroup of members, as a leader or as a member you might want to be in a group with multiple colors, and you might want to have RED members in there.

A new CREATIVE COACHING TIME starts, your turn now:
🌱 How does your team resolve issues?
🌱 Under a lot of pressure, is your team collaborating or blaming each other?
🌱 How RED is your team today?
🌱 How RED would you like it to be in the future?

Another perspective can be to use colors to define roles in a team. Roles that requires to execute tasks most of the time, are RED roles. For example a role that is solving technical issues on daily basis is a RED role. You can have in your role a % of tasks you execute on systems under an HR role. These are different ways of seeing what we do through colors.

Teams usually play a role in an organization, that is what we can call the mission of a team. When we use colors to identify the mission of a team, we might find different colors in one team, but there is one that is predominant from others.

A RED Team’s mission is associated to teams for which most of their activities are based on execution more than planning, design or client experience. Some examples of these kind of teams are operations, back office, payroll and building maintenance to name just a few.
The last aspect that I would like to make you reflect on is how to create RED spaces at work. These spaces should be inspired by the meaning of the color RED. These are some ideas, but I am sure you and your team can come up with more:

🌱 RED ENERGIZE activity: an initiative that can inspire your team members to improve their vital energy like fitness, pilates, yoga, running club, and expeditions in nature
🌱 RED Meetings: can be sessions with your teams after working on solving an issue to reflect on what they learned and do an small celebration on the team success on it
🌱 RED Spark meetings: can be check in meetings where the team join to provide progress on solving an issue. We don’t pay a lot of attention on how we name some critical meetings, in my experience I have heard name like war rooms. Don’t you think it is a more inspiring name to call them RED Spark than war rooms? How does it sound to your brain? Are you going to a war or are you going to spark an idea to solve the issue?
🌱 Daily RED: could be the famous meetings in Agile methodology called Daily Scrum call. These meetings are 15 mins calls at the beginning of the day (and sometimes before the end of it) to talk about the issues and road blockers the team is facing on the task they are working on.

These are just some examples of how we can resignify the way we tackle issues at work as well as expanding our use of this color on daily basis.

I would love to hear from you how you have resignify the use of this color and which new ways of applying it you found. Please send me an email, this book is being written by being read by each of you. Your are part of it.

Hope this helps!

Stay colorful in a black and white World

Laus 🌱💛Hope this helps!