Anatomy of a Lifelong Learner

Dunn and his team also have developed the THR Leader Behavior Model (Figure 1), a six-pillar construct that directs curriculum development for the top 200 THR leaders, who have 24 hours of required training per year. “Let’s say there are 30 outcomes on the business plan. In order to make those happen there’s going to have to be a change in leader behavior because if what we’re doing today is not delivering those outcomes then we need to do something different.”

“He has taken the organization through a nine-month research process to understand and define what are the competencies of a true Texas Health Resources Leader,” Hawthorne said. “Most important were the interviews with our own leadership across the organization to talk about what competencies they feel are critical to be an effective leader. Once that research was done, Jim and his team created the context or material to advance these six pillars to help advance THR leaders going forward.

Now we have people from all over the country coming to study the development of our leadership training and our model.”

Dunn, an avid student and teacher as well as practitioner, doesn’t seem surprised at the attention his efforts have drawn in the industry. He said he will never allow himself to become so comfortable having a certain title, income or even respect from his THR peers and CEO that he stops learning himself. He said there’s too much riding on his continued momentum in the business, and it goes against his personal motivation and philosophy around continuous learning.

“When I get in conferences and I hear the learning leader say, ‘my CEO or my leadership, they just don’t get it,’ what I interpret that as is, they don’t get it because you don’t help them get it. The only way I can help my leadership get it is to stay developed and as well-read in the business as they are. I read the same books the CEO and the leadership teams are reading. I’m looking at the same positive or negative trends and performance in the organization, and I’m thinking about the things that keep them up at night. Then I go back into my learning world to find what I have in my arsenal of learning and development that will assist them.”