Savvy early-stage marketers often find themselves with a team constructed mostly (sometimes entirely) out of external collaborators. From PR agencies to brand strategy consultants, copywriters to designers, and advisors both formal and informal - the talent orbiting your marketing department can be what makes or breaks your brand. Treating these essential contributors like employees or simple transactional service providers can blunt their efficacy, limit their contributions, and even sour their willingness to keep you as a client.

Drama is part of our nature - it’s going to pop up pretty much anywhere humans interact. In fast-growing startups, drama has a way of seeping into developing cultures, wasting time, and causing resentment between coworkers. Navigating through dramatic situations requires understanding the patterns behind them. That’s exactly what we discussed in a recent workshop with Conscious Leadership coach Kaley Klemp. This approach, which Kaley calls “Taking 100% Responsibility,” starts with identifying the known patterns of drama.

With most of us now six weeks into staying inside, it’s become clear how difficult this working from home thing can be. We asked Hiten Shah - founder of work collaboration app FYI and one of the smartest WFH minds we know - to talk us through his methods of optimizing performance for distributed teams, his learnings on people management from afar, and even his advice on how to keep the peace at home. Jack Altman - founder and CEO of Lattice, currently working from home with a 4-month old - ran the interview and asked questions that yielded real, actionable takeaways.