Martijn van Dam: ‘Make sure your employees know what keeps you awake at night’

How would you explain what you do to a child?
I tell my children: on the internet, you are being watched everywhere. My twelve year old daughter understands that perfectly, but then she says: yes, Dad, but that happens everywhere, doesn’t it? Yes, I say, but that is not okay. Everyone tries to influence you based on your online behaviour. What you buy, what you want to watch, what you want to read, and I am convinced it can be done differently. That is what we are building now.

The start up Datakluis is developing a digital vault, essentially a cloud based safe that holds all your data. You can access it yourself, and you decide who gets to see what. Almost nobody wants to lock down all their data, personalisation is here to stay. What we enable is that companies can use your data once, and only for the purpose you have explicitly agreed to. So if I am buying shoes online, for instance, I tick a box saying the shop may see my shoe size and which shoes I have previously bought, but only during that one session. And there are countless applications you could imagine.

How have you changed over the past ten years?
I have become a more complete person. Ten years ago, I was still a member of the House of Representatives. I became one quite young, almost immediately after university. As an MP you learn a great deal. You need a vision, you need to know what your mission is, and you have to be able to tell your story. On the same day you might speak with CEOs and with people in a working class neighbourhood, and you have to be able to listen at both levels. What is on their mind? How does that relate to the things I am doing?
But there is also a lot you do not learn. I had hardly any management experience. I only had my small team of staff. In a company, I would have developed very differently, so I had to learn all of that later.

What was the hardest part?
As a politician, you focus on the substance. Other people take care of everything else. When I first started as a board member at the NPO, I sometimes thought: we have now discussed three times which direction we are going in, so why is nothing moving? I had to learn to intervene. I also learned that, as an executive, you are much more a manager of the process. And that you have to apply that management with restraint. What do you get involved in, and what do you not? Especially in the small team I am in now, it is tempting to meddle in everything, but it is far better not to.

How do you bring out the best in others?
By explaining why they should do something, rather than what they should do. Your most important role is to share your vision, what you want to achieve, and why. That creates the conditions for people who know more about the subject than you do to deliver that result. They already have the expertise. You have to provide the motivation, the atmosphere, and the environment in which they can perform at their best.
The second thing is to take good care of your people. In an organisation that is building a product, you can give people a great deal of freedom. We encourage people to block out one day a week, and we have unlimited leave.

Does that actually work?
People are perfectly capable of judging for themselves when they can take time off and when they cannot. And if it is not clear, you always have your teammates to align with. They will definitely tell you: in the week before we go live, it might not be the best idea to go on holiday with your family. In practice, we still find ourselves mainly telling colleagues to take it a bit easier.

What is the most difficult decision you have ever had to make?
The single hardest decision I have ever had to make was when I was still an MP, and it concerned the deployment of military personnel to Afghanistan. That was about life and death. It was so dangerous there. We knew not everyone would make it back alive. The military know that too, they sign up to that risk, but at that moment you have to be absolutely certain you are doing the right thing. When, two years later, we were no longer sure, we withdrew our support for the mission in Afghanistan.

And if you look at your current work?
I hold several roles. As a supervisory board member at health insurer CZ, we put an entirely new executive team in place last year. The top structure was redesigned, there was a new strategy, and that required a different way of working from the top down. It is inspiring to see how well it turns out, but for a supervisory board it is one of the most high stakes things you can do.
And at Datakluis, we went live in November on five platforms at once, with a version that was not completely finished. That is obviously extremely tense.

Have you ever demonstrated?
Yes. The first time was in the 1990s, against cuts to education. The last time was when I joined a climate march. I had not even come specifically for it. We were in Amsterdam and I said to the children: let’s walk along for a bit, then you will know what it feels like. But in general I hardly ever demonstrate anymore. I feel there are other routes. And the world is so polarised now. It is more about confrontation than about what we do want. I miss a positive agenda.

What is the best advice on leadership you have ever received?
Someone once said to me: it matters that you share with your employees what you feel as well. What makes you happy, what makes you uneasy? What keeps you awake at night is extremely valuable information for your employees. Because in technology, something always goes wrong at some point. Bad leaders turn that into a problem every time. It is crucial that the people you work with know when you are truly going to start worrying, because that is the moment they should come rushing into your office.

If you could introduce one new law, what would it be?
As a former politician, there are countless laws I would like to change, but the most important issue to me is how poorly we reward the people who are on the front line of society. Take teachers. They have such an impact on children’s lives, but they are no longer held in high esteem. We no longer reward what we value.

The most money is not made from the things that benefit society the most. Our economy is so financially dominated. Making money from money is not something that improves society. It is encouraging to see more and more executives with a mission, but you can also see at Unilever how quickly that can disappear again. We need people who do the right thing.

What would you like to pass on or leave behind?
This is what I try to pass on to my children. It is lovely to have a comfortable life, but try to do something with it that helps other people too. That is how I try to live. I want to have impact. I want what I do to matter.

Datakluis is a start up. We might not even make it through the next investment round. So if you speak to me next year, I might be doing something completely different. But the essence will always be the same. Do something you believe in, and make a contribution while you are at it.

Interview: Vera Spaans | Photography: Pieter Bas Bouwman | Videography: Freelancers United