Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rules for Building Great Teams

In 1932, one of history’s greatest architects, Frank Lloyd Wright founded the Taliesen Fellowship and welcomed 23 apprentices into his world. For the next 27 years Wright taught and lived between Wisconsin and Taliesen West in Scottsdale, Arizona, with numerous sets of students, some of whom went on to work for his firm after graduating. In his 1943 memoir, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography, Wright listed a Taliesen fellow’s ideal qualities:

Fellowship Assets:
I. An honest ego in a healthy body – good correlation
II. Love of truth and nature
III. Sincerity and courage
IV. Ability for action
V. The esthetic sense
VI. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work
VII. Fertility of imagination
VIII. Capacity for faith and rebellion
IX. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance
X. Instinctive cooperation

The qualities Wright valued for his team of architects is a strong match for the traits we seek in champion interim executives. We value sincerity, courage, an ability to act, great imagination, capacity for both faith and rebellion, and instinctive cooperation – what a great model for the RED team.