Let’s Celebrate Our Mistakes!
Smart + Heart: Why Character Beats Control in Leadership. (Podcast with Edufuturists)
If you lead a team, a classroom or a school and you've ever wondered why "getting tough" only works for so long, this conversation reframes leadership and teaching around humility and love as performance drivers, not soft add-ons. It's a direct challenge to fear-based, exam-obsessed culture in education, backed by two decades of research and lived experience.
In this episode of the Edufuturists podcast, Ben and Steve sit down with Dave Jones and Stephen "Klem" Klemich to unpack Heart Styles, the character development framework built on 18 years of research into what really drives effective leadership, teaching and learning. Dave Jones is the founder of Uplift, a coaching and leadership consultancy based in High Wycombe, UK. He is an accredited Heart Styles practitioner whose career has spanned youth work, church leadership, and running a school hub for Oasis UK's multi-academy trust in South London, before moving into full-time leadership consultancy. Klem is the co-founder of Heart Styles, a global character development methodology now used across corporate, education and sporting organisations. Based in Sydney, Australia, he spent over 40 years in people development and 18 years researching the principles behind effective and ineffective leadership behaviour. We cover:
What Heart Styles is and the 18-year research behind it
Why fear and ego-driven pride quietly sabotage classrooms and leadership teams
The shift from fight and flight into flow, and what it does to the brain
Why humility, not control, is what actually builds trust and results
Moving schools and organisations from a parent-child dynamic to adult-to-adult culture
The "smart plus heart" model for raising a whole person, not just a result
Why celebrating mistakes builds nimble, high-performing teams
Klem's own story of undiagnosed dyslexia and the teacher who nearly broke him