Investigations

Whether you are interviewing potential suspects or witnesses, the goal will be the same—get the information you are looking for, while being open and receptive for that which you may discover on the way to your goal. Not all techniques work all the time. Here are some examples that worked, and some pitfalls to avoid.

Retail workers need to hear the message—frequently—that their company cares about them. Employment law experts, speaking at recent national security conferences, suggested three steps to reduce the likelihood that retail workers will feel that you ignored or mismanaged their complaints.

Does it seem like we label everything around us now? A certain look on your face has a name, people are naming their cars,...

Not every time we sit down to talk to someone are we necessarily going to use the W-Z method. But when we do, we should be prepared to talk through every step of the W-Z method, which means all 18.

I'm Dave Thompson with the Wicklander-Zulawski, and today I want to talk about the risks of leaving your subject alone in the interview room. When I say subject, that means it could be the suspect or implicated person, a witness, or even the victim or complainant of some type of crime, fraud, or employee relations issue.

The extent to which retail investigations have been transformed by analytics is a good reflection of just how quickly things move in a technology age. LP execs from Bloomingdale’s, Safeway, Home Depot, Designer Brands, Best Buy, and Walmart weigh in on the evolution of investigations.

In the first two parts of this series on thoughts and gestures in interviewing, we looked at gestures that occur in combination with spoken words. These gestures are also sometimes called illustrators as they help the speaker add meaning and context to the words spoken. There are other physical movements people make that are not done to support the actual spoken language. In part 3 we discuss pantomimes, emblems, and adaptors.

Sometimes old habits die hard. In fact, on many occasions, they refuse to die on their own, so they must be dealt with from...

We discussed some of the geographic differences when using gestures in other cultures in our last column. We also touched on the differences between...

My husband Wayne and I have been sharing a lot of sad, knowing looks lately. You see, our son Greg, just graduated from high...