Interviewing Yourself: Hypotheses, Verdicts, and a Blue Beard

I read Maria Makarushkina's “Interviewing Yourself: Individual Assessment as a Tool for a Manager's Self-Analysis.” What interested me most was the glimpse it offers behind the scenes of individual assessment: how a consultant listens to a person's biography, notices recurring motifs, and turns them into hypotheses about character, motivation, and managerial behavior.

That is also exactly where my main doubt appeared. In some stories, the author seemed to interpret biographical details too broadly. Taken to the point of caricature, the reasoning would sound like this: someone loved the color blue as a child and therefore grew a blue beard. There is no such example in the book, of course; that is my metaphor. But the problem is real: a psychological story may sound perfectly coherent without being the only—or even the correct—explanation.

At some point, I realized that the crucial boundary lies between a hypothesis and a verdict. - A hypothesis sounds like this: “Perhaps having to take responsibility for others at an early age is connected to my need to control everything today.” You can live with that idea for a while, test it across situations, ask colleagues, and eventually discard it. - A verdict sounds almost the same, except that “perhaps” has disappeared: “You control everything because you had to grow up too early.” The explanation has become more confident even though no new evidence has appeared. To give the author credit, throughout the book she always notes the importance of additional data for testing a hypothesis—although the conclusions are often categorical and then followed by claims along the lines of: time passed, and of course everything worked itself out exactly that way.

This led me to another distinction: assessment for yourself and external assessment. 🤔 In self-assessment, even an inaccurate hypothesis can still be a useful question. The interpretation remains mine: I can test and discard it without turning it into someone else's personnel decision. Although it is easy to create a comfortable story here too: call control responsibility, or conflict avoidance empathy. ↗️In external assessment, the same hypothesis can become a label and influence hiring, promotion, or an entire career. A plausible connection to a biography is therefore not enough for me. I would also want observable behavior, concrete workplace situations, feedback from others, several independent sources, and a clear answer to the question: “What evidence could disprove this conclusion?”

The book itself has three parts 1️⃣ The first walks the reader through their own biography: early childhood, parents, family messages, a first job, and significant events 2️⃣ The second examines the personality profile: patterns of thought and speech, motivation, responsibility, communication, and self-esteem 3️⃣ The third presents recurring life scripts drawn from the author's consulting practice Throughout the book, these themes are accompanied by stories about executives and exercises for self-diagnosis.

I would recommend the book to managers and anyone curious about what happens behind the scenes of individual assessment. It offers good questions to ask yourself and makes an assessor's reasoning easier to understand. Its answers, however, are best left in the status of hypotheses for a little longer :)

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