Business Confidential

CHAPTER FOUR

Building a Committed Cadre

Hiring people with the right qualities does very little for your organization in the long run unless you actively keep those people engaged. They need to sense that their work is truly valued.

As I noted earlier, recruitment is the heart of what case officers do at the Agency. The nature of the work is engaging and Headquarters makes sure that work can be carried on by providing ongoing training and mentoring. If a case officer needs to influence the media in a particular country, for example, he gets familiar with their professional terrain and then tries to recruit people in those media. The case officer’s stratagem for working his way into their network and putting people in play in that network keeps ...