The leaky bucket and beanie

I have a personal goal that is non-functional and qualitative.

Whenever I get a chance to meet (or re-meet) people, I try to engage in a positive productive manner. Using light banter & pleasantry has served me very well in helping build relationships and rapport.

This behaviour has become an intrinsic part of my own personality. The leaky bucket theory is an analogy used to understand customer relationship management and its correlation with customer lifetime value and retention… "The leaky bucket theory indicates that companies are always losing customers, so to maintain share, you have to win an equal number of new customers to keep the bucket full and maintain equilibrium.

This could be achieved through improved customer acquisition or working on customer retention." >> https://lnkd.in/gB6-mDBi

I apply the leaky bucket analogy to building and maintaining relationships. If I am not engaging my stakeholders, my bucket continues to drain. However, when I am using the behaviour mentioned above, I find I am able to fill the bucket more quickly and the leak is slower.

Case in point.. As many of you know I'm slowly becoming more aerodynamic up top and with the sudden cold snap passing Sydney I've been wearing my beanie more often. On a recent MS-Teams workshop call, I got a chance to connect with someone from the Melbourne office because he too was in a similar boat and we had a good laugh about it with others also on the call. That little 20-40 second banter helped set the tone for the rest of the call.

The takeaway here is about sharing my experience and one particular method I have found extremely useful in managing stakeholder relationships.