Notorious Dutch bluntness? Creating a transparent team culture

Rob Reeve, CEO LexTego

In my last blog, we shared a little of our history as a company, in this blog, I want to share more of the culture we are fostering in LexTego.

Junaid, my co-founder, and I met whilst working in Amsterdam. For those who have had the privilege of working with Dutch people will understand well. The “notorious dutch bluntness” is often misunderstood and interpreted as rudeness – however this is just their way of letting you know when they disagree with you and rather than wasting time they just tell you how they see it. As the company developed, we were fortunate to discover Maarten – who is now our CTO – but Maarten is also Dutch, so the straight talking is part of who we are as a management team. We have turned this straight talking into a key foundation for the company and adopted a principle of transparency in everything we do.

As a company we have a weekly meeting – we call “Win of the week” – we take this time to share how the company is doing, but also how we are doing individually. As a remote first company – this is a great way of sharing each other’s successes and achievements. For those who have worked in a Startup, you will know that cashflow is critical – so we also keep everyone informed on where we are financially. A number of new starters have been surprised that we have adopted such an open approach – but for Junaid, Maarten and I – not sharing is not showing the rest of the team the respect they deserve.

For our delivery, we know every member of the team will try their hardest to achieve great things, like any company there are limits to our capacity, and as a startup we are still only a small team. In our Sales process, we made a conscious decision to only talk about the Product we currently have with any potential customers. A sales person can promise the world to try and win new business, but failing not only damages our reputation but also risks impacting our customers.

We always share what our Roadmap allows over the coming months, and where there is flexibility to cater for more changes in functionality. Like all good startups we are driven by Customer feedback but the transparency ensures we don’t over promise and under deliver.

I recognise that as we scale rapidly and add new team members, maintaining these standards will stretch us; by using this blog we hold ourselves out to our customers and partners to live by this expectation. As a team we firmly believe that maintaining the high standards we have set ourselves through all apsects of the business – we will set ourselves up for success.

Rob