Ever thought about what colour you might be? Recently we met with C-me Colour Profiling to determine the personality types within the Storm team and how best to communicate together.
C-me is a behavioural profiling tool that helps us understand a person’s likely preferred way of doing things. A C-me profile gives you information about your preferred behaviours expressed in the language of the different combinations of four colours: Red, Yellow, Green and Blue. This combination gives each person their unique temperament. The approach provides a behavioural language to help you to understand, remember and relate to your own preferred way of working, but also to use and translate into action.
Prior to our session with C-me, each of us were asked to complete 15 questions where we were asked to rank certain phrases about behaviours and personality traits by how much we related to them.
For example:
Our answers generated a detailed individual report to explain our results, which were to be presented to us at our team session with C-me.
Now, we’re going to be honest, there were a few sceptical minds amongst us going into this. We’d all heard of colour profiling before and those who had experience of it previously were generally given a brief ‘one-size fits all’ colour explanation.
However, this was not the case with C-me. The level of detail and accuracy was at times a little scary! But we’ll come on to that…
Our C-me Colour Profile Session
We had a whole afternoon session where we took part in a number of exercises and had the opportunity to discuss our results.
Before we were given our reports, the C-me representative presented us with a number of cards each with a statement. You then had to choose the cards you felt most related to you and then assign your remaining cards to a colleague who you felt represented that statement. For example: “Likes to be given all the details first”, “Always keen to suggest a social activity”, “Can be impatient and prefers to get on with it” etc.
Once we had each received our cards, on the back of each was one of the colours. We then grouped ourselves into the colour we had received the most. And surprisingly we were quite evenly spread! You’d think in a web agency the majority would fall in to one category, however, that was not the case.
In light of who had fallen into each category, we discussed what each colour may mean.
Now *spoiler alert* this is where (based on our own assumptions) each of the team fell within the colour wheel:
🟥 Red: Dave (CEO) and Alice (Project Manager). Likes to take action, managerial, upfront, authoritative, good communicators, realistic, fast-paced.
🟨 Yellow: Tom (Designer) and Holly (Marketing). Creative, social, easy-going, enthusiastic, big picture thinking.
🟩 Green: Hannah, Mark and Dylan (Developers). Caring, supportive, conflict averse, likes teamwork.
🟦 Blue: Adam (CTO), Liam and Barry (Developers). Analytical, logical, technical thinkers, likes detail to make decisions.
OK, you may be thinking that was quite predictable based on each person’s job role, however, that was just based off our own assumptions and also does not reflect the other colours each person was assigned.
That’s where the reports came in.
Each person received a 10-page report explaining (in quite accurate detail) how that person tends to work and their preferred way of working with others. You don’t just receive an overall colour either, it shows your levels of each colour. So most people actually have a real mixture.
Obviously, there was always going to be some level of disagreement with a few of the statements across the team, but largely they were quite on the nose.
From Dave’s ever-changing and excitable mind to Holly’s ‘let’s all just go grab a drink’ attitude (just kidding…sort of) 😏
The report also details your strengths and how you add value to a team, how you prefer to be communicated with, areas that need some development and behaviours that you may not be aware of, as well as advice on how to handle setbacks or stress.
We won’t detail each of our own reports (as that’s probably a little too personal) but it was certainly an eye-opening experience that not only helped us to understand ourselves more, but also how to understand our colleagues better.
The effective communication section of each person’s report was very useful as everybody communicates differently. In any business, good teamwork is vital to success, so the exercise of colour profiling was incredibly helpful and highly recommended.
In a client-centred business such as Storm, it also helped us think of the different personalities we work with on a daily basis. If we can understand our clients’ personalities better (even in just a broad sense) then we will know how to tailor our communication and ultimately provide a better service overall. This is where understanding colour profiles can really come in handy from a business perspective.
If your business is interested in improving communication and teamwork, head over to the C-me Colour Profiling website for more information or to book a session. They can even send you a sample report to understand the detail provided.
We still can’t understand how they get it so accurate. It must be some sort of wizardry 🧙♂️
Disclaimer: Our C-me session was pre-lockdown. We promise we’re not flouting social-distancing rules in the above photo!
