Paul Cronin, senior vice president and partner at Atrion Networking Corporation, a Carousel Company, has shown strong IT leadership and education, continuously cultivating his own leadership skills and helping others develop their own at Atrion and beyond.

Cronin has also been actively involved over the years in CompTIA, a non-profit trade association that helps advance the global interests of IT professionals and IT channel organizations, co-chairing its Partner Advisory Council and serving on its board of directors. He especially enjoys helping to provide strategic, near-term insight on issues and trends affecting the IT channel while presenting ideas and initiatives to the association’s staff with the intent of improving and growing business for the industry as a whole.

When asked what’s helped him most in his career by CompTIA’s Spotlight on Success, Cronin answered, “I’d say it was becoming a student of leadership. You pursue it through reading and practice, and through some formal training. And by helping others to do it.”

In pursuit of that end, Cronin and Atrion’s CEO Tim Hebert have each assumed the role of “master facilitator” of The Leadership Challenge, a formal development workshop that helps attendees dramatically improve their leadership skills. “We have run these sessions every single month since for our clients, employees, vendors and acquaintances,” Cronin shared in his CompTIA Spotlight feature. Noting that he and Hebert charge nothing for these workshops, from which there are more than 1,250 alumni, Cronin added, “Our purpose at Atrion is to positively impact the lives of others, and we firmly demonstrate that.”

Cronin’s shares his expertise and thought leadership in other areas as well, including:

• his regular column for SDM, which covers high-level physical and cybersecurity issues; he’s also routinely a moderator and panelist at various cybersecurity conferences such as ISC East and West, and PSA Tech
• his serving as a board member for many industry organizations in addition to CompTIA, including the IT Careers Foundation, Channel Partners, and NSCA Foundation (among others)
• educating many companies’ corporate executive teams on cybersecurity topics

Cronin has also pioneered Atrion’s reciprocal loyalty program in which vendors are asked to invest in Atrion just as Atrion invests in them; the program is designed to promote mutual investment without reservations and enables a deeper level of vendor-partner understanding and commitment.

“We need to continue to get better at leading,” Cronin said in his Spotlight feature. “It may sound rather corny, but if you can help others lead in their own lives, whether in their families, communities, at work or in other activities, it all comes back in a positive way.”