Remember these three wants when you're dealing with your help.
Get your "help"—it may be the switchboard operator or it may be a thousand automobile workmen—in the position of wanting those same three things. The help's job is his "trade," you are his customer; and his compensation is his profit.
When you do that, you have an employee or helper who is going to give you the hearty cooperation you're looking for—just so long as you are a good customer, and his compensation for helping you is a fair profit.
Next time you go into a store, try to keep that thought fixed in your mind. Everyone working in a business, you see, is selling his services—and when you use those services you are the buyer. Perhaps you pay in money for the services rendered—perhaps you simply repay him by making his day's work easier. In either event, treat your requests for service as though you and he were transacting a business that is mutually, but individually, profitable, and the cooperation which is otherwise usually begrudged will be automatically forthcoming.
But that, you say, is PERSONALITY. Then how do you account for this?
A. is a big, breezy salesman. He busts into a hotel, calls the "greeter" behind the desk by name, asks for 1209 "same as last time"—and gets all kinds of real service from porters, bell-hops and waiters.
It looks as though it might be personality.
Yet right behind him walks B. He's a horse-faced bird who never smiles—wiry, monosyllabic—asks brusquely for a $4 room—gets it. And gets everything else he asks for—just as promptly as A. does.
No, it can't be personality. For there's C. and there's D. C. is A's twin—and B. and D. were cast in the same mold. Their tips are no smaller; their demands no more unreasonable. Yet C. gets the poorest sample room in the house. And D's trunk is always the last one the porter brings up.
These aren't exaggerated cases. Hotel men will tell you they happen every day.