He made them feel needed

Brittanica Online

In The Path to Power, Robert Caro illustrates the transformation of LBJ from someone noone liked through his childhood and college into someone with incredible charisma.  Earlier I noted the section on his incredible effort and drive that showed up in his early school teaching career.  

Here, LBJ is working as a NYA administrator and being incredibly rude and abusive to workers in his office... yet people still were drawn to him.  

Cursing his men one moment, he removed the curse the next -- with hugs ("I saw him get angry at Sherman Birdwell one time, and he used most of the cuss words and combinations I  had ever heard," Morgan says, "and just as soon as he got through eating his ass out, he had his arm around him") and with compliments, compliments which, if infrequent, were as extravagant as the curses: remarks that a man repeated to his wife that night with pride, and that he never forgot.  He made them feel needed. (358)

In that same paragraph, Caro writes:

Mary Henderson recalls watching him in a crisis, when he was "absolutely frantic with worry." And she recalls that when the crisis was over, "he said: 'I have never been in need of people, or been in trouble, without looking around and finding your face.' And he put his arm around me. And I was nobody. Oh, you wanted to please him more than anything." (359)

Henderson later recounts:

I find it hard to understand when I talk about it now. But he had what they call now a charisma. He was dynamic, and he had this piercing look, and he knew exactly where he was going, and what he was going to do next, and he had you sold down the river on whatever he was telling you.  And you had no doubts that he was going to do what he said - no doubts at all..... Working for him was very exciting. Fascinating. History was being made. The country was being turned around. And Lyndon was one of the turners -- one of the makers and the doers and the shovers.