Damn. Austen slumped against the back of her chair. She had really looked forward to offering their customers a Christmas tree that was safe for their pets. It would have been a unique product that none of their competitors had thought of so far, and it would have put Feathered Friends on the map as a company that knew what bird owners wanted. She stared past Dee to the glittering band of the Willamette River right across the street. Finally, she inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Okay. So it happened. How can we move forward from here?”
“First thing we should do is fire Courtney,” Dee muttered. “Or maybe pull out every single one of her brightly painted finger- and toenails with a pair of pliers first and then fire her.”
The vivid description made Austen smile despite the seriousness of the situation. She reached across the desk and gently nudged her partner. “Come on. Everyone makes a mistake every now and then. Firing her probably isn’t the best way to deal with it—and neither is shouting at her.” She couldn’t keep the gentle rebuke from her tone. “All that’s going to do is make her even more nervous, and that’s not going to help her job performance.”
Dee leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. “Well, coddling her the way you’ve been doing isn’t helping either.”
“Coddling?” Austen echoed. “I’m not coddling her. I’m just being friendly.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing, Austen. You’re not her friend. You’re her employer, and you need to start acting like it.”
“And that means I can’t treat her like a human being?” Austen refused to accept that. “Did you see the look on her face when she ran out of here? She’s terrified of you.”
Dee shrugged. “Maybe she’ll take her responsibilities more seriously now.”
Austen stared at her. Sometimes she couldn’t believe that this tough businesswoman was the same person as her gentle, considerate lover. “Is this really how you want things to be at Feathered Friends? You’re no longer at Kudos. We’re a tiny company. It’s like a family. There’s no need for you to keep acting like the ice queen who has employees for breakfast and then picks her teeth with their bones.”
Dee snatched up the squishy stress ball from her desk and started kneading it. “No.”
“No, that’s not how you want things to be?”
“No, we’re not a family. We might be tiny, but we’re still a business,” Dee said, her tone firm. “Treating employees like family members doesn’t work. There needs to be a hierarchy and clear expectations, or it’s all going to hell in a handbasket.”
“I’ve got nothing against clear expectations, as long as it’s not the expectation that employees will be shouted at and threatened to be fired whenever they make a mistake.”
Dee pressed the badly mangled stress ball against her desk with so much force that it started to resemble a pancake. “Or the expectation that employees will be coddled and defended, no matter how badly they harm the company.”
They stared at each other across the desk. Austen refused to back down and look away from Dee’s heated gaze.
“This good-cop-bad-cop game you’re playing isn’t fair.” Dee pronounced every syllable clearly, as if she needed all her self-control not to shout at her.
“Game? What are you talking about?” Now Austen struggled not to raise her voice too. “I’m not pla—”
“Yeah, you are.” Dee flung the stress ball into a corner. “You’re letting them get away with too much, and that forces me to be the ice queen.”
A knock on the door interrupted, and Eliza, their second employee, stuck her head into the office. She looked from Dee to Austen and back. “Um, sorry to interrupt. We just got the list of materials from the potential new supplier.”
Austen suppressed a sigh. Eliza wasn’t responsible for ordering materials. That list had been emailed to Courtney, but she had sent in Eliza because she didn’t want to face Dee.
“Courtney says they look great because their paints are all nontoxic,” Eliza continued. “She wants to give them the go-ahead, but I wasn’t sure, so—”
“No!” Dee shot out from behind her desk. “Jesus, I told Courtney at least three times that paints, even nontoxic ones, are out. Birds can choke on the paint chips. What we need is a vegetable-based dye that will—” She took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, her gaze went to Austen and she visibly reined herself in. “Can this wait?” she said to Eliza but didn’t look away from Austen. “We were in the middle of…um, something important.”
“Oh, sure.” Eliza backed away. “I’ll just tell Courtney not to do anything until she talks to you.”
“It’s okay,” Austen said to Dee. “Deal with this. We’ll talk later.”
Dee searched her eyes. “Are you sure? I can—”
“I’m sure.” Austen stood. Arguing back and forth wasn’t accomplishing anything other than hurting each other, and that was the last thing she wanted. “We’ll talk once we’ve both calmed down, okay?”
Dee hesitated for a few moments and then nodded. “Okay.”
Austen slipped past Eliza, ignoring her curious looks, and walked to the stairs without detouring to her office. She needed some air.
Austen stretched her arms out along the back of the bench, tilted her head back, and let the spring sun warm her face. A jet boat roared past on the Willamette, and the wind blew through the cherry blossoms on the tree behind her, carrying the scent of empanadas from a nearby food cart.
Her stomach grumbled. Too bad she had run out of the office without her wallet. Lunch would have to wait. She wasn’t sure she could eat right now anyway, with all the snippets of their heated conversation bouncing around her head.
Coddling her the way you’ve been doing.
You’re not her friend. You’re her employer, and you need to start acting like it.
She had known she and Dee had very different business approaches, but this was the first time they had argued about it. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time Dee had thought about it, though. Why hadn’t she said anything before? They should have been able to talk about it instead of letting things build up.
One thing Dee had said in particular kept going through her mind: This good-cop-bad-cop game you’re playing isn’t fair.
Was there some truth to that?
It was tempting to blame it all on Dee and her inability to adjust to a new leadership style.
But deep down, she knew it wasn’t that simple. Maybe she had been a little too lenient with Courtney. Admittedly, it wasn’t the first—or even second or third—mistake their admin had made. She was fresh out of college, so Austen had hoped she just needed some time to settle into her first real job. Instead of taking action and confronting Courtney, she had just waited and tried to be positive and encouraging.
Apparently, Dee had felt forced to take up the slack and step in.
Austen should have seen it coming. Sitting around, waiting patiently for a problem to sort itself out, had never been Dee’s strong suit. She should have—