Business Confidential

CHAPTER SIX

Collection—Interpersonal Skills

A case officer primarily meets people of interest and works one-on-one to determine if they have the access the officer is seeking, and if they are open to cooperating covertly to provide information. Equally, what would it take to elicit their cooperation? If I break down the occupations in the world into five basic categories—teach, make, fix, persuade, and uplift—then I would say that the dominant category for a case officer is persuade. That makes the officers first cousins to people in sales, motivational speaking, politics, and criminal law, among others. They have to have good interpersonal skills in order to be successful; as a general rule, the sharper those skills, the more they achieve the ...