Maintenance Mindset: What color is your grease? Discover your plant’s lubrication personality

Welcome to Maintenance Mindset, our editors’ takes on things going on in the worlds of manufacturing and asset management that deserve some extra attention. This will appear regularly in the Member’s Only section of the site. This week's column features guest contributor Michael D. Holloway, President of 5th Order Industry.

Key takeaways

• Grease archetypes reveal common maintenance mindsets, from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability analysis.
• Color-coded performance levels help identify weak spots and drive a more consistent, data-driven approach to lubrication.
• A sustainable lubrication program requires culture change—strategize, analyze, and evolve beyond tribal knowledge.

This lighthearted but greased-up take is inspired by What Color Is Your Parachute? Richard Bolles’ iconic career guide has helped job seekers make sense of their skills, goals, and place in the world since the 1970s. Packed with self-reflection tools like the “Flower Exercise,” the book urges readers to look inward before launching outward. 

The premise: career success isn’t about chasing job postings, it’s about knowing who you are, what you’re good at, and where you thrive. I made it about three-quarters of the way through the book. But somewhere around the flower coloring section, my mind wandered back to the maintenance shop and the grease gun in my hand, and it hit me. 

What if the same philosophy applied to reliability? What if our grease told the story?  Turns out, it does.

What your grease color reveals about your machinery lubrication strategy

Just like parachutes, grease comes in many colors and those colors carry meaning. Maybe you will use a brilliant blue lithium complex, or a stubborn tacky red Aluminum Complex. Or maybe your bearings are oozing a green-gray mystery paste from the Reagan era. Whatever it is, the color of your grease says something about your maintenance philosophy:

• Reactive?
• Predictive?
• Proactive with a side of hope and a spreadsheet?

Grease isn’t just a lubricant. It’s a diagnostic messenger, a history lesson, and in some shops, a confession. So, let’s use it the way Bolles used flowers: as a mirror for introspection and a tool for clarity.

Exercise 1: The Grease Flower

In What Color Is Your Parachute? Bolles guides readers through a seven-petal flower diagram, each petal representing a different part of their ideal job. For us, petals represent the facets of your lubrication program.

Draw a flower with seven petals or use a whiteboard in the maintenance office if you’re feeling bold. Color each petal based on how well you think you’re doing.

The Seven Petals of the Grease Flower

1. Application Method. Manual, automatic, centralized, or “I think Rick hits it with the grease gun whenever he hears squeaking.”
2. Grease Selection. Mineral or synthetic? Food-grade or high-temp? Or whatever’s left in the open drum near the door.
3. Interval Discipline. Do you grease based on calendar time, runtime, condition monitoring, or an ancient tribal ritual passed down through shift leads?
4. Contamination Control. Is your grease kept sealed and clean, purged regularly, or does it smell faintly like coolant and despair?
5. Training and Knowledge. Certified lubrication technician? YouTube mechanic? Or just "Jim’s been doing it for 30 years, and that’s good enough for me"?
6. Failure Feedback Loop. Are bearing failures investigated and used to improve the program, or shrugged off and blamed on “junk parts”?
7. Root Cause Culture. Do you actually want to know why things fail, or is “it just happens” good enough?

Wth Grease Flower petals, we’re representing performance or maturity level of each program component, like a heat map for lubrication effectiveness. Here’s a color scheme for the seven petals:

Petal Coloring Scheme – Performance Maturity Levels

Example: Petal 1 - Application Method
•    Manual, inconsistent → 🟥 Red
•    Centralized, semi-auto, but skipped steps → 🟨 Yellow
•    Fully automated with audit trail and flow verification → 🟦 Blue

Now, step back. Is your flower vibrant blue, green and healthy? Or does it look like it’s been through a hot bearing purge and forgotten on the dock? While red roses are the flowers of passion, here a red flower represents the need for counseling!

Exercise 2: Grease Archetypes (aka: What Color Grease Are You?)

Let’s bring some personality to this. What archetype best matches your style? The colors listed for the grease archetypes (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Black) reflect personality types or maintenance styles. 

🔴 Red Grease: The Firefighter –  You live for emergencies. Bearings dry? Pumps growling? You’re there, grease gun in hand like a hero in a 1980s action flick. But firefighting isn’t a strategy. It’s a symptom.

🟢 Green Grease: The Environmentalist – You’ve got biodegradable grease in color-coded cartridges, applied with the precision of a Swiss watch. Sustainability, uptime, and vibe alignment? You’re living the green dream.

🔵 Blue Grease: The Analyst – You trend wear metals, calculate RPVOTs in your sleep, and have a laminated viscosity chart on your fridge. You don’t just grease – you diagnose. Your plant may not understand you, but it needs you.

🟡 Yellow Grease: The Optimist – You had great intentions: manuals were read, spreadsheets built. But the plan? Not exactly followed. And yet… somehow… things haven’t exploded. Yet.

⚫ Black Grease: The Historian – Your bearings are packed with decades of cross-contamination and mislabeling. You're not running a lubrication program you’re curating an archaeological dig.

Creating a sustainable, discipline-driven lubrication culture in your plant

If grease is what keeps your bearings spinning, your maintenance culture is the system that delivers it. Without discipline, the whole machine runs hot, loud, and eventually, into the ground.

• Don’t just lube: learn.
• Don’t just schedule: strategize.
• Don’t just replace: analyze.

Every program can evolve. Every plant can improve. Every maintenance tech can move from red to blue with the right mindset, tools, and culture. Grease may tell your story, but it doesn’t have to write your ending. Like a career path, lubrication programs can be reimagined, rebuilt, and re-colored. So…what color is your grease?

And yeah, maybe I should’ve finished the whole book to know why Bolles used a flower instead of a parachute. Maybe because flowers are grounded, complex, and constantly growing just like a good reliability program.