The Book of Business Etiquette

by Nella Braddy Henney

Most places hate to discharge a man. Labor turnover is too expensive. Most of them try to place their men in the positions for which they are best suited. It is easier to take a round peg out of a square hole and put it into a round one than it is to send out for another assortment of pegs. Men are transferred from sales departments to accounting departments, are taken off the road and brought into the home office, and are shifted about in various ways until they fit. If a man shows that “he has it in him” he is given every chance to succeed. “There is only one thing we drop a man for right off,” says an employment manager in a place which has in its service several thousand people of both sexes, “and that is for saying something out of the way to one of our girls.”

This same manager tells the story of a boy he hired and put into a department which had been so badly managed that there were a number of loose ends to be tied up. The boy threw himself into his work, cleared up things, and found himself in a “soft snap” without a great deal to do. He happened not to be the kind of person who can be satisfied with a soft snap, and he became so restive and unhappy that he was recommended for discharge. This brought him back to the head of the employment bureau. He, instead of throwing the young man out, asked that he be given a second trial in a department where the loose ends could not be cleaned up. It was a place where there was always plenty of work to do, and the young man has been happy and has been doing satisfactory work ever since.

The house in which this happened is always generous toward the mistakes of its employees if the mistakes do not occur too persistently and too frequently. In one instance a boy made three successive errors in figures in as many days. He was slated for discharge but sent first before the employment manager. As they talked the latter noticed that the boy leaned forward with a strained expression on his face. Thinking perhaps he was slightly deaf, he lowered his voice, but the boy understood every word he said. Then he noticed that there was a tiny red ridge across his nose as if he were accustomed to wearing glasses, although he did not have them on, and when he asked about it he discovered that the boy had broken his glasses a few days before, and that he had not had them fixed because he did not have money enough.

“Why didn't you tell us about it?” the employment manager asked.

“It was not your fault that I broke them,” the boy replied. “It was up to me,” an independent answer which in itself indicates how much worth while it was to keep him.

The manager gave him money enough to have the glasses mended, the next day the boy was back at work, and there was no more trouble.

An employee in the same organization unintentionally did something which hurt the president of the firm a great deal. But when he went to him and apologized (it takes a man to admit that he is wrong and apologize for it) the president sent him back to his desk, “It's all right, boy,” he said, “I know you care. That's enough.”

In a big department store in New England there was a girl a few years back with an alert mind, an assertive personality, and a tremendous fund of energy. She was in the habit of giving constructive suggestions to the heads of the departments in which she worked, and because of her youth and manner, they resented it. “I took her into my office,” the manager said. “I'm the only one she can be impertinent to there and I don't mind it. It is a bad manifestation of a good quality, and in time the disagreeable part of it will wear off. She will make an excellent business woman.”

“If a man finds fault with a boy without explaining the cause to him,” we are quoting here from an executive in a highly successful Middle Western firm, “I won't fire the boy, I fire the man. We have not a square inch of space in this organization for the man who criticizes a subordinate without telling him how to do better.” Unless the plan of management is big enough to include every one from the oldest saint to the youngest sinner it is no good. Business built on oppression and cut-throat competition, whether the competition is between employer and employee or between rival firms, is war, and war, industrial or political, is still what General Sherman called it some years ago.

We hold no brief for paternalism. We have no patience with it. All that we want is a spirit of fairness and coöperation which will give every man a chance to make good on his own account. This spirit inevitably flowers into courtesy. In every place courtesy should be, of course, so thoroughly a part of the surroundings that it is accepted like air or sunshine without comment. But it is not, and never has been except in old civilizations where manners have ripened and mellowed under the beneficent influence of time. Our traditions here—speaking of the country as a whole—are still in the making, but we have at least got far enough along to realize that it is not only worth while to do things that are good, but, as an old author has it, to do them with a good grace. It cannot be accomplished overnight. Courtesy is not like a fungous growth springing up in a few hours in the decayed parts of a tree; it is like that within the tree itself which gives lustre to the leaves and a beautiful surface to the whole. It takes time to develop it—time and patience—but it is worth waiting for.