The Book of Business Etiquette

by Nella Braddy Henney

Her employer is considerate of her always. He does not make a practice of taking ten or fifteen minutes of her lunch hour or five or ten minutes overtime at the close of the day, but when there is a good reason why he should ask her to remain he does so, asking courteously if she would mind staying. If she is genuinely interested in her work—and this young lady is—she will stay, but if she has an even better reason why she should go she explains briefly that it is impossible to stay. He never imposes heavier burdens upon her than she can bear, but he does not hesitate to ask her to do whatever needs to be done, and he does it with a “Please” and a “Thank you,” and not with a “See, here” and a “Say, listen to me, now.” She is a very pretty and attractive girl, but the man she is working for is a gentleman. To him she is his secretary, and if he were ever in danger of forgetting it she would be quick to remind him. She does not go around with a chip on her shoulder all the time, and she talks freely with the various men around the office just as she does with the women and girls, but it is in an impersonal way. She never permits intimate attentions from her immediate employer or any one else.

Executives. “Executive” is a large, loose word which rolls smoothly off the tongue of far too many business men to-day. Office boys begin to think in terms of it before they are out of knee trousers. “I could hold down the job,” said a youngster who had hurt his hand and whose business was to carry a bag of mail from a suburban factory into New York, “if I could get some one to carry the bag.” “I can do the work,” say smart young men in the “infant twenties” (and many others—there is no age limit), “but I must have a man to look after the details.”

The way to an executive position is through details. Work, plain hard work, is the foundation of every enduring job, and the executive who thinks he can do without it has a sharp reckoning day ahead. In most places the executives have worked their way up slowly, and at no time along the way have they had that large contempt for small jobs which characterizes so many young men in business. They have been perfectly willing to do whatever came to hand.

But after all this is said, the fact remains that an executive is successful not so much because of his own ability as because of his power to recognize ability in other men. He is—and this is true of every executive from the president down—the servant of his people in much the same way that the President of the United States is the servant of the American people. This means that he must be readily accessible to them, and must listen as courteously to them as if they were important visitors from across the sea or somewhere else.

Many executives—and this was true especially during the war—have surrounded themselves with a tangle of red tape which has to be unwound every time an employee (or any one else) wants to get near enough to ask a question. This is absurd. Sensible men destroy elaborate plans of management and find they get along better without them. The Baldwin Locomotive Works, which has a hundred years of solid reputation behind it, has no management plans. “There is about the place an atmosphere of work, and work without frills or feathers,” and this is essentially true of every business that is built to last. Look at the organizations which, because of war conditions, rose into a prosperity they had never enjoyed before. Most of them have collapsed, and the little men who rose with them (so many of them and so much too small for their jobs) have collapsed with them.

In the big reliable concerns, and the small ones, too, the high executives are easily approached, especially by the members of the organization. In many of the open offices—and open offices have done much to create a feeling of comradeship among workers—the desk of the general manager is out on the floor with the desks of the rank and file of the employees with nothing to distinguish it from theirs except the fact that there is a bigger man behind it. A real man does not need a lot of elaborate decorations. They annoy him.

There are two sides to this, however. Visitors from the outside are not the only ones who are likely to waste the time of other people, and a busy man has to protect himself from indoor nuisances as well as those that drift in from the outside. Some do it by means of secretaries, but a good executive needs no barrier at all between himself and his own men. They learn soon enough—we are speaking now of a good executive, remember—that there is no use in going to him unless there is some definite reason why they should, and that the more briefly and directly they present their problem the more likely they are to have it settled.

When an executive receives a caller (or when any man in a business house receives a caller) he should receive him and not merely tolerate him. A young advertising man who began several years ago had two very interesting experiences with two gruff executives in two different companies. Both consented to see him, both kept on writing at their desks after he entered and gave him scant attention throughout the interview. Apparently they were both successful business men. Certainly they both held positions that would indicate it. Yet both of them a few years later came to the young advertising man at different times looking for jobs. Needless to say neither found a place with him, not because he held a grudge against them, but simply because he knew what kind of men they were and that they could not help in the kind of business he was trying to build.

From the beginning of the interview the host should do all he can to make his visitor comfortable. You see a lot in certain magazines about setting the visitor at a disadvantage by giving him an awkward chair, making him face the light and grilling him with questions. It is pure nonsense.

It is very gracious for a man to rise to greet a caller and extend his hand, especially if the caller is young and ill at ease. It is imperative if it is an old man or a woman. He should ask the visitor to be seated before he sits down himself.