Lawline Team Culture Series - Post 1 of 20

On January 24th, 2012, President and CEO of Lawline.com, David Schnurman, presented "10 Keys to Creating an Amazing Team Culture" in New York City. The event turned out to be a great success with everyone in attendance participating and collaborating on ideas used by Lawline.com. Over the next 20 days I will be highlighting main points from the lecture and how it is used by Lawline.com.

The Jolt

Every morning Lawline.com holds a company "Huddle" to start the day at 8:30am. A different employee is assigned to present each morning for 5 minutes to get the day started before breaking out into departmental meetings. It is common for an employee to perform a Jolt to start the day and get their creative juices flowing.

A Jolt is a brief exercise moderated by the presenter prior to going into their presentation. Before presenting the "10 Keys to Creating an Amazing Team Culture", David started by having everyone in attendance stand and face the person next to them. The Jolt he had everyone perform was "The 3 Handshakes." The first step of the Jolt was to shake the person's hand next to you as if you were the shyest person in the world. Next, you shook their hand as if you were the most arrogant person in the world. And finally, you shook the person's hand next to you as if it were your best friend who you had not seen in ten years.

This allowed everyone to get acquainted in a much different way, got everyone laughing, and set the tone for the evening's presentation.

Next time your giving a presentation, try a Jolt! To learn more about Jolts check out the book "Jolts! Activities to Wake Up and Engage Your Participants" by Sivasailam "Thiagi" Thiagarajan and Tracy Tagliati.