William James Reddin also known as Bill Reddin (May 10, 1930 – June 20, 1999) was a British-born management behavioralist, theorist, writer, and consultant. His published works examined and explained how managers in profit and non-profit organizations behaved under certain situations and conditions.Reddin, WJ, The Output Oriented Organization The focus of his work was to understand to what extent managers were effective in their role and successful in managing situations to have the right impact on the organization's objectives.
Through extensive research Reddin concluded that there is no ideal management style.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness & Style: Individual or Situation He put forward that there was only one realistic and unambiguous definition of managerial effectiveness, the extent to which a manager or leader achieves the output requirements of the position.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness, chp. 1 This is the manager's or leader's only job: to be effective.
Reddin was often quoted as saying both in his writings, to his clients and to his students, that there is no ideal style of managing; and there is no one way to make an organization more effective. He wrote in his 1988 book, The Output Oriented Manager, "… no list exists in the world showing characteristics of effective managers, or, of effective organizations, which apply generally.Reddin, WJ, The Output Oriented Manager, p. xi He went on to write that his works' intent were to serve as a substitute for prescriptive management-guru advice prevalent in modern business, to enable the manager and leader in diagnosing what is the true situation and what are the true needs. They served managers and leaders to make sound decisions on how best to arrive at their planned objectives.Reddin, WJ, The Output Oriented Manager This concept of managerial effectiveness is the central issue of Reddin's research, teachings, writings, diagnostic material and in his consulting and training.
Reddin advanced a theory to explain a critical and fundamental aspect of organizational success. He called it the 3D Theory.
This theory was contrary to popular management-belief at the time. Where Bill Reddin maintained that managerial effectiveness is defined in terms of output rather than input, meaning what they achieve rather than what they do, his colleagues in behavioralist studies and human psychology held that there were indeed ideal styles of management behavior.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness & Style: Individual or Situation
Personal life and foundations of his philosophy Bill Reddin was born in 1930 to a working-class family with a variety music hall background. Due to the war years, the early part being an evacuee then the loss of the family home during an air raid, he experienced many schools in several different towns.
At the age of 14+ he left school and took up a position in a local factory as opportunities to continue his education were not an option at that time.
In December 1947 after much family consultation he emigrated to Canada. For 5 years he lived with one of his sister's, who married a Canadian, and her family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He held various jobs during this time from street sweeping to a lab assistant until he joined the Canadian army as a radio operator - signal man.
While in the army he completed high school through correspondence courses. In 1950 he entered the University of New Brunswick at the age of 20. He graduated with honors holding a dual major in economics and in psychology.
During these years in university he continued working odd jobs saving enough money to attend Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, his thinking about the impact of management on a society of people, and the social responsibility of organizations began to form.
He took exception that certain subjects like ethics were not part of the course offerings nor part of the curriculum's dialogue. He had a visceral reaction against what he called the crown prince mentality and the emphasis on winners over losers.Business guru was best selling author, Gregory Dole, National Post, 1999 In his two years at Harvard Business School he was dismayed that they were assigned only one book on exploring organization and people which was Carl Roger's Counseling and Psychotherapy.Reddin, WJ, The Output Oriented Manager, (1988) Beyond that we received no advice, no lectures and three cases to talk about each day!" he later wrote.Reddin, WJ, The Output Oriented Manager, (1988), p. x Out of this expertise came his thinking around compassionate management, akin to a do unto others approach. He wrote that it is important to consider the enterprise not only as a technical or administrative system but also a human system.Reddin, WJ, The Best of Bill Reddin, Any Manager's Responsibility, (1985), p. 4
In subsequent years he encouraged his own students to be widely read not just on business, management and behavior, but the works of such authors as St Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, and The Rule of St Benedict, both of which are works on military history and strategy. These writers, he contended, had unique and humane insights to management where the object is not just getting results, but that the result is done right for the good of society at large.
Reddin received a Sloan Doctoral Fellowship from the MIT Sloan School of Management following graduation from Harvard. It was at MIT that he began to evolve his theories on managerial effectiveness interwoven with the responsibility of an organization's impact on society or the social system it served.
In his seminal article, Any Manager's Responsibility he explained his thinking in the opening paragraph: Managers should be effective. This means delivering on what their job really is and creating conditions so that subordinates may also become effective. Well-designed organizations are quiet places in which to work and they are effective. Poorly-designed organizations lead to heart attacks and ulcers. Work and play are not very different. Managerial effectiveness can be defined and measured. It is a useful idea any manager can embrace. It is not personality, but performance. The manager in society is solely responsible for creating wealth by combining resources in new and useful ways. If managers are not effective the country is less competitive and old age pensions smaller. The price of low effectiveness is minimum wages, premature retirement and closed-down works.Reddin, WJ, The Best of Bill Reddin, Any Manager's Responsibility, (1985) p. 4
In 1965, Reddin joined the faculty of the University of New Brunswick Business School. For the next 17 years he established himself as a leading academic, thinker, writer and consultant on management. His home in Fredericton served as a forum for students and scholars to discuss ideas and issues governing management and organizations. When he travelled for work he left a key on the door ledge for students to let themselves in to browse among his over 30,000 volumes in his library. This library served as a sort commons rooms for students and thinkers alike. Reddin was a chef as well as wine connoisseur and students found themselves debating the concept of Reddin's 3D Theory, and Management by Objectives (MbO) over gourmet wines and dinners.Business guru was best selling author, Gregory Dole, National Post, 1999
In 1974, he left the world of academia, to apply his action-oriented work into practice and founded a management consultancy practice and expanded to over 25 countries. Today, Reddin Assessments. has served over 3,000 clients worldwide and train more than 500,000 managers over the world. Over the past 45 years his clients included Fortune 500 and other global multinationals including Kodak, Westinghouse, Ford, Siemens, Westpac and Martin Marietta, Santander, Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca, Novartis and many many more. Bill died peacefully in 1999 in London and twenty years after his death, his company is still alive.
The 3D Theory Reddin's research published in his 1983 PhD thesis, Managerial Effectiveness and Style: Individual or Situation indicated that the notion of a single ideal management style was not sound nor useful. He recognized that it was a manager's effectiveness as key to an organization's success. He maintained that managerial styles are best understood in relation to specific situations, to the effectiveness it had on advancing the goals and success of an organization.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness & Style: Individual or Situation, pgs. 17–20
"Any managerial style has a situation appropriate to it, and many situations inappropriate to it…", Reddin wrote in his book that explains his theories and models, called Managerial Effectiveness published in 1984. "…The added third dimension could be labeled appropriateness of style to situation" or, effectiveness—in having the right impact.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness, p. 7
"The 3D Theory" essentially is a framework emphasizing concepts and relationships rather than descriptions. It was designed to serve as a practical tool for managers and team leaders showing effectiveness as a central value. At the heart of the 3D Theory there is a simple idea, he wrote, which he discovered through a long series of research studies, and in close collaboration with key thinkers and teachers and writers on organizational development and psychology.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness & Style: Individual or Situation, pgs 180–197
Psychologists worked out that there were two main elements in managerial behavior which concerned the task to be done and the relationships with other people.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness & Style: Individual or Situation, pgs. 14–16 They also recognized that managers or team leaders sometimes emphasized one, and sometimes emphasized the other, and that these two elements of behavior could be used in small or in large amounts. A manager could be more task oriented (dedicated managerial style) at times, or relationship oriented (related managerial style), use less task oriented and relationship orientation to manage the team (separated managerial style) or both behaviors could be used together (integrated managerial style).
These four basic styles represent four types of managerial behavior. Reddin was clear that not all types of managerial behavior fit cleanly into these four types, but served as the general framework for his 3D Theory. Since no one managerial style is always effective, and his research showed that any of these four basic styles could be effective in certain situations and not effective in others.Reddin, WJ, Managerial Effectiveness & Style: Individual or Situation, p. 17 The effectiveness was contingent on the situation in which they are applied. Effectiveness is the third dimension—each one of the four basic styles has a less effective equivalent and a more effective equivalent. Therefore, these 8 managerial styles are not 8 additional kinds of management behavior. These are the names given to the four basic style when used effectively or appropriately, or less effectively. The dimensionality of effectiveness comes into play along the x/y axis of Task Orientation (TO) and Relationship Orientation (RO).
Basic Style Less Effective Managerial Style More Effective Managerial Style Separated Deserter Bureaucrat Related Missionary Developer Dedicated Autocrat Benevolent Autocrat Integrated Compromiser Executive
He understood that managerial styles themselves represent fairly wide ranges of behavior. And, that managerial styles could not be defined solely with reference to effectiveness as behavior. Included in his model of the 3D Theory are two key concepts of flexibility and rigidity—to the extent which a manager or leader is versatile in managing their style for the right impact.