Aristotle was very interested in skills, and one skill he was particularly interested in was persuasion, or rhetoric. Persuasion is a subset of the much vaunted ‘communication skills’.
His view was that rhetoric consisted of three essential elements; Logos (reasoning), pathos (emotion) and ethos (character). Aristotle recognised that people don’t make decisions based on reasoning alone, but that emotions are also an important cue for how we make sense of the world.
But the element I want to focus on here is ethos, or character. People believe people that they trust. People trust people based on their character. Character is something that is formed over time, based on lived experience and past behavior. So even if we are focused on skills, we come back to lived experience and past behavior as an important underpinning element in at least one key skill….persuasion.
Furthermore different types of character appeal to different people. I am working on a skills project at the moment where the work I am analysing requires persuasiveness. My client’s customers are particularly inclined to trust people with common lived experience; doing physically demanding work in outdoor environments. A different professional context would require a different ethos to enable persuasion. The rhetorical power of a particular ethos depends on the audience. We can see then that many skills (like persuasiveness) are highly contextual.
But Aristotle had another point to make…ethos in some cases can be rhetorically constructed. By using rhetorical tools like anecdotes, a speaker can give the impression of having a trustworthy character. By calling on certain prior beliefs in their audience, speakers can use rhetorical short-cuts to create a persuasive ethos. This implies that the skill of persuasion is interactional…the fact that the audience believes that the speaker is persuasive; makes them persuasive. This is another important lesson about skills in workplaces…it is of little consequence if you scientifically demonstrate someone has a particular skill. If the people around them don’t believe it…they are unlikely to be able to manifest that skillfulness at work. Skills are in part a rhetorical construct.
In my view there is no skill utopia where we develop a universal standardised definition for every skill, and then seamlessly match people with that skill to the corresponding work. The skills construct is fantastic though, for grappling with the complexity of contemporary knowledge work…especially with a dose of Aristotle.