Natasha Lee’s leadership philosophy is as bold as the company she’s built with co-founder Matt Floyd: lead with trust, hire and promote with intention, and be fearless enough to step into roles before you feel ready. Her recent round-table discussion with The National Association of Locum Tenens Organizations (NALTO) touched on hers’ and other industry leaders’ roles in breaking barriers to empower women in locum tenens leadership.
Trust as a Leader’s Greatest Leverage
When Natasha talks about “leadership leverage,” she doesn’t start with title, metrics, or market share—she starts with trust. In her view, trust is something you earn over time by showing up the same way all the time, especially when things are hard.
She describes this as demonstrating consistency, emotional steadiness under pressure, fairness, follow through, and a willingness to tell the truth “without any drama.” That combination gives her teams confidence that she’ll be transparent about tough decisions and grounded in how she makes them.
Trust, in her experience, changes how an organization works. When people trust their leader, they bring better information, accept difficult decisions more readily, and move faster with less oversight. In an industry where disruption is constant (credentialing shifts, last‑minute client changes, and provider burnout) trust becomes a business asset.
Self‑Promotion Without Apology
Natasha rejects the idea that self‑promotion is something to be cautious about. “Be your own cheerleader,” she says. “Self‑promote away. Take credit for your wins. Give others confidence around you that you’re capable of doing more.”
For her, self‑promotion is a leadership behavior. It signals readiness for bigger roles and more challenges, especially when you’re stepping into responsibilities you’ve never held before. By connecting your results to organizational goals and being explicit about what you’ve delivered, you build the confidence, both in yourself and in others, that you can operate at the next level.
Natasha also points out that most men aren’t agonizing over whether advocating for themselves will be perceived negatively, so she questions why women should carry that extra burden. Her advice to emerging leaders in locum tenens is clear: if you want a seat at the table, act like you belong there, speak up about your performance, and don’t wait for someone else to “discover” you.
Finding the Right People for the Right Roles
Natasha is open about the fact that one of her most underestimated challenges was finding and retaining “the right people in the right roles.” For her, it’s a core leadership skill you must master if you want to build the best team around you.
From launching new offices and service lines to taking a firm from 15 to 90 people in under five years, Natasha has seen that sustained growth only happens when you’re very intentional about who sits in certain seats.
At Floyd Lee Locums, that shows up in how she thinks about internal talent:
- She hires for resilience and adaptability because staffing requires “grit and determination” and the ability to pivot quickly when assignments fall through or conditions change.
- She’s candid that staffing “is not for everybody” and that people either discover they’re built for this work or they self‑select out.
- She views it as her responsibility to provide real career paths (not just jobs) with intentional benefits for personal and professional success, calling that her “career legacy.”
Ultimately, Natasha believes leaders owe their people more than a paycheck. They owe them growth, development, and work that genuinely matters.
Isn’t it time someone took care of you?
Building an Intentional, Human-Centered Culture
Culture, for Natasha, is the lived experience of how people are treated and supported every single day. She measures the strength of Floyd Lee Locums’ culture by both external recognition (multiple “best places to work” awards) and internal reality (how people feel about coming to work based on surveys, manager one-on-ones, and other Floyd Lee Locums’ metrics).
Several themes define how she thinks about culture in healthcare staffing:
- Trust-based work: Long before the pandemic, she embraced remote work to “hire the best people wherever they sat,” building a high-trust model where performance—not proximity—was the standard. After COVID hit and much of the industry scrambled, she leaned further into that model instead of reversing it.
- Respect for life outside work: She’s explicit that evenings, weekends, and vacations are meant to be protected. The company does not allow PTO buy‑outs because she wants people to actually take time off and protect their well‑being. Her team is not encouraged to “check in” on time off, either.
- Benefits that match the emotional load of staffing: Recognizing that staffing can be “tough” and that being a working parent can be tougher, she’s invested heavily in mental health benefits and wellness initiatives so people can sustain high performance while protecting their wellbeing and personal time.
Natasha also refuses to glamorize burnout. In a sector that often treats exhaustion as a badge of honor, she echoes the belief that “exhaustion is not a leadership competency” and that sustainable performance requires sustainable people.
Fearless Leadership and “Doing It Anyway”
If there’s a single throughline in Natasha’s leadership story, it’s fearlessness—not the absence of fear, but the choice to act even when fear is at the forefront.
She started Floyd Lee Locums by going “all in” on a new brand with just five people, taking on significant financial risk at a time when failure would have had real consequences for her family and her team. When the pandemic hit, half of Floyd Lee Locums’ assignments were canceled overnight. Rather than retreat, she led the company into a high‑stakes respiratory therapy project in a COVID “hot zone,” mobilizing 25 respiratory therapists in two weeks despite travel chaos and unknown factors with logistics.
A little later, when the U.S. began receiving Afghan refugees, she agreed to staff military hospitals in temporary tent environments. What began as 20 physicians quickly became 120 on the ground in six weeks—a massive, high‑risk operation that added roughly $20 million in revenue but also concentrated risk into a single client. She moved forward anyway, driven by the mission and the opportunity to serve “these new Americans” and the country.
Her advice to emerging leaders reflects this, “Do things you’re not ready for.” She frames discomfort as evidence that growth is available on the other side. In her view, if you are waiting until you feel entirely ready, you are waiting too long.
Paving Roads for the Next Generation
Natasha is clear that leadership isn’t just about her own trajectory; it’s about “paving roads for others to drive on.” Several leaders invested in her early career, taking chances on her in roles she hadn’t held before, and she sees an obligation to do the same for emerging leaders now.
That shows up in how she:
- Intentionally promotes women into executive seats even when they haven’t “already done the job,” mirroring the sponsorship she received herself when she was new to the industry.
- Tracks and shares metrics like female representation in senior leadership so everyone can see that advancement is possible.
- Sponsors people both inside and outside her organization, defining sponsorship as, “what opens doors for you when you’re not in the room.”
She believes senior leaders have a responsibility to bring up new leaders in general, and that for women who’ve reached the C‑suite, sponsoring other women is paving roads that make the journey less lonely and less constrained for the next generation. Advancement should not be a sole journey.
What Natasha’s Approach Means for Healthcare Staffing Leaders
For people leading or aspiring to lead in healthcare staffing, Natasha’s philosophy offers a practical blueprint:
- Treat trust as your primary operating system: consistency, steadiness, and candor are your tools.
- Connect your results to business outcomes and ask for the opportunities you’ve earned and aren’t quite ready for.
- Get very good at talent—hiring, placing, and retaining the right people in the right roles is the real competitive advantage.
- Build culture as a system that’s human‑centered, inclusive, and protective of people’s lives outside work.
- Be fearless in practice: raise your hand before you’re ready and say yes to the projects that scare you.