Author Note: This narrative was prepared for Voices of Physicians, an offering of Mozibox. Portions of the author's leadership journey are adapted from previously published articles in the Physician Leadership Journal and Healthcare Administration Leadership & Management Journal.
I did not begin my life imagining that I would become a physician executive. I began with a much simpler ambition: to become stronger than my circumstances.
I grew up with limited resources, limited confidence, and no clear map for how to move from where I was to where I hoped to be. After high school, I joined the United States Marine Corps. At the time, I thought the Marine Corps would make me tough enough to conquer the world. What it actually gave me was something far more useful: discipline, structure, time management, and the belief that growth comes through discomfort. I learned that every minute matters, that standards matter, and that self-discipline is not a personality trait but a practiced behavior. Those lessons became the foundation for everything that followed.1
After the Marine Corps, I returned to school through the support of the G.I. Bill. I started at community college, behind many of my peers academically and unsure of exactly where I belonged. I joined the National Guard because I missed the camaraderie and purpose of military service. A practical decision to become a combat medic changed my life. In that role, I saw medicine at its most human level: people vulnerable, afraid, injured, and in need of someone willing to help. That experience awakened in me a calling to medicine.1
The road was not clean or easy. My wife and I moved through years of financial strain, uncertainty, and sacrifice. Medical school required us to leave the support of North Dakota and move to the Chicago area with an infant son. The Army Health Professions Scholarship Program helped, but it did not remove the strain of trying to raise a family while pursuing a demanding medical education. My wife worked full time. I studied constantly. We stretched every dollar and learned that dreams require not only ambition but endurance.1
After medical school, I began internal medicine residency at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. After my first year, I made a decision that redirected my career. I volunteered to leave residency and deploy as a general medical officer to Afghanistan. I became a flight surgeon with the 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade at Forward Operating Base Wolverine. There, I was placed in situations for which no classroom could fully prepare me. I managed a pharmacy with controlled substances, oversaw public health measures, supported a blood program for trauma casualties, cared for soldiers with limited imaging and laboratory support, and made decisions where waiting for perfect information was not an option.1
Afghanistan taught me that leadership is not about having complete certainty. Leadership is about making the best decision possible with the information available, accepting accountability, and adjusting quickly when new facts emerge. It was also where I discovered occupational and aerospace medicine. Those fields brought together safety, prevention, operations, population health, and mission readiness. They showed me that medicine was not only about treating disease after it appeared. It was also about designing systems that protect people before harm occurs.1
After three deployments and eight years of Army service, I transitioned out of the military because my values required it. My priorities were God, family, and country. Military service had shaped me, but the demands of continued deployment were placing strain on my marriage and family. That decision was difficult, but values clarify decisions. I left active service carrying the lessons of sacrifice, discipline, mission focus, and servant leadership.1
My civilian leadership career began at Marshfield Clinic Health System in Wisconsin, where I was entrusted to rebuild occupational and employee health services. Marshfield served rural communities that often felt overlooked by the healthcare industry. That mission resonated deeply with me. I had practiced leadership as a military officer, but civilian healthcare required a new kind of learning. I sought mentors, joined the American Association for Physician Leadership, earned the Certified Physician Executive credential, and pursued a Master of Business Administration so I could better understand the business language of healthcare.1
At Marshfield, I learned how health systems actually function. I learned operations, finance, employee health, workers’ compensation, occupational medicine, safety, electronic health record implementation, service-line development, and employer partnerships. Over time, the occupational health service line expanded from two locations with 1.5 provider full-time equivalents to seven locations with nine provider full-time equivalents. Workers’ compensation charges grew from approximately $8 million to $39 million annually.
That role taught me that physicians can lead far beyond the exam room when they are willing to learn the operating system of healthcare. Occupational health sharpened that perspective. In my Physician Leadership Journal article, I described occupational health as a field that requires the physician to consider the employee, the employer, coworkers, customers, and public safety. That is what drew me to it. It is medicine practiced at the intersection of individual care, workforce performance, legal risk, prevention, and community health.2
As I grew, I also experienced rejection. I was passed over for leadership opportunities. Those moments stung. But over time, I came to see rejection as diagnostic rather than destructive. Every “no” contained information. Sometimes the feedback was vague. Sometimes it was incomplete. But the pattern mattered. I began to evaluate myself through two lenses: character and competency. Character asked who I was becoming. Competency asked what skills I still needed to build.3
That became one of the most important leadership lessons of my career: success is not about avoiding failure. It is about using failure as instruction. I developed a personal leadership framework around traits I remembered from military life: judgment, justice, decisiveness, integrity, dependability, tact, initiative, enthusiasm, bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty, and endurance. I also came to believe that loyalty should never come before integrity.3
Eventually, my journey led me from a large rural health system to Mental Health Cooperative in Nashville, Tennessee, where I became Chief Medical Officer and Chief Medical Informatics Officer. This move placed me in a smaller organization with broader executive accountability. At Mental Health Cooperative, the work expanded from a defined service line into enterprise leadership across clinical services, behavioral health, value-based care, population health, informatics, technology, quality, access, revenue cycle, and organizational strategy.6
That transition reinforced something I later wrote about in “Where Physician Leaders Are Made”: Large systems teach scale, governance, and institutional complexity; smaller organizations teach operating integration and consequence. In a smaller organization, the distance between strategy and execution is shorter. There are fewer layers, fewer places to hide weak understanding, and more direct accountability for outcomes. The physician executive is not simply invited to observe the business; the physician executive is pulled into it.5
At Mental Health Cooperative, I have had the privilege of leading clinical services and enterprise technology operations, including oversight of prescribers, information technology, analytics, clinical workflow redesign, value-based care initiatives, facility billing implementation, physician compensation redesign, and access improvement. We increased the percentage of unscheduled and walk-in patients seen from approximately 40% to more than 95%, reduced provider credentialing timelines from more than 180 days to less than 100 days, and improved long-acting injectable antipsychotic utilization for individuals with schizoaffective disorder from less than 20% to more than 29%.6
Those numbers matter, but they are not the story by themselves. The story is that physician leadership works best when clinical judgment, operational discipline, financial understanding, data, technology, and mission are connected. A physician executive must be able to translate across worlds: clinicians, operators, finance leaders, information technology teams, payers, boards, regulators, and communities. The work is not simply to advocate for physicians. It is to help design systems where patients receive better care, teams can do their best work, and organizations can sustain their mission.
My military background remains central to how I lead. In my article on transitioning military flight surgeons, I argued that battalion and brigade flight surgeons are an underrecognized source of healthcare leadership talent. They are trained to think in terms of population health, logistics, safety, readiness, and execution. They learn to use structured decision-making methods and to translate data into action. Those skills transfer directly into civilian healthcare leadership.4
I also believe physicians have a responsibility to learn the business of healthcare. Not because business replaces the mission, but because mission fails when the operating model fails. A physician who does not understand access, staffing, claims, payer rules, technology, productivity, quality metrics, and financial sustainability may have good intentions but limited impact. Physician executives must be willing to move from opinion to ownership.
My story is not one of perfect planning. It is a story of hard work, opportunity, faith, family, service, failure, and adaptation. I did not follow a straight line. I moved from the Marine Corps to community college, from combat medic to medical student, from Army flight surgeon to occupational and aerospace medicine physician, from service-line medical director to chief medical officer and chief medical informatics officer. Each phase gave me something the next phase required.
The Marine Corps gave me discipline. The National Guard gave me medicine. Medical school gave me endurance. Afghanistan gave me decision-making under uncertainty. Occupational and aerospace medicine gave me a systems view of safety and prevention. Marshfield gave me scale, mentorship, operations, and service-line growth. Mental Health Cooperative gave me broader executive accountability and the opportunity to connect clinical care, technology, finance, population health, and mission for vulnerable patients.
I have come to believe that becoming a physician executive is not about leaving medicine. It is about expanding the definition of care. Sometimes care happens in the exam room. Sometimes it happens in a board meeting, a budget discussion, a payer negotiation, a workflow redesign, an information technology decision, a quality dashboard, or a leadership conversation that determines whether patients can access care at all.
For physicians considering leadership, my advice is simple: Do not wait until you feel ready. Readiness rarely feels complete. Seek responsibility. Ask for feedback. Study finance. Learn operations. Understand technology. Find mentors. Accept rejection as instruction. Stay grounded in your values. Remember that leadership is not a title; it is the willingness to carry responsibility for outcomes larger than yourself.
I began with humble circumstances and limited confidence. Through hard work, opportunity, mentors, family support, faith, and time, I became a physician executive. I still see myself as a work in progress. But I also believe my journey reflects something important about medicine: Physicians can and should lead systems, not because they are above others, but because they understand what is at stake when systems fail the people they were built to serve.
Healthcare needs physicians who can care for patients and also repair the structures around them. That is the work I feel called to do.
References
Cronrath, C. M. (2024). The power of hard work, opportunity, and time: A physician’s personal leadership journey. Physician Leadership Journal, 11(1), 19–22. https://doi.org/10.55834/plj.6002711894
Cronrath, C. M. (2024). Why occupational health matters. Physician Leadership Journal, 11(2), 51–53.
Cronrath, C. M. (2024). The upside of rejection: How to turn setbacks into stepping stones for success. Healthcare Administration Leadership & Management Journal, 2(6), 291–292. https://doi.org/10.55834/halmj.6088088531
Cronrath, C. M. (2024). Transitioning military flight surgeons: Untapped leadership potential. Physician Leadership Journal, 11(4), 38–39. https://doi.org/10.55834/plj.1259705285
Cronrath, C. M. (2026). Where physician leaders are made: What large systems, small organizations, and role transitions teach physicians about learning the business of healthcare. Unpublished manuscript.
Cronrath, C. M. (n.d.). Executive resume: Physician executive, clinical operations, and health system strategy. Unpublished curriculum vitae.
