'Learning to Manage as Learning to Fail: the Lessons of Running' Leadership, Organisations, Behaviour and Reputation Research Seminar

Following an early career as a marine ecologist at a field centre in rural Pembrokeshire, Professor Black moved into HR management within retail management. Her key role was to implement the recruitment and development strategy during a period when the branch was under considerable strain, both locally in terms of staffing availability and as a result of changing sales strategies.

Professor Black joined Newcastle Business School in 2014 following 10 years at the University of Chester, latterly within Chester Business School. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Certified Management and Business Educator and an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. In addition, she is co-Chair of the British Academy of Management (BAM), with responsibility for Management Knowledge and Education, co-leads the BAM's Education-Focused Professor programme and has been Chair of the BAM's Identity Special Interest Group since 2018.

The topic of this presentation is 'Learning to Manage as Learning to Fail: the Lessons of Running'. Alongside Dr Russell Warhurst, Professor Black received the Management Learning Best Paper Award 2024 for her paper on this topic.

This seminar will explore the aims of management learning, namely to ensure managerial success and how failure, whilst acknowledged, is framed through learners being encouraged to adopt a growth mindset and to bounce back from failure. However, the complexity of contemporary managerial work and the degradation of the managerial labour process mean that managers increasingly experience failures. Managers, therefore, need to learn not merely from failure, but to learn to tolerate failure; in other words, to fail well.

Professor Black's research differentiates types of failures and focuses on intractable failures that leave managers feeling inadequate, corroding their sense-of-self. Therefore, an affective and embodied identity-based understanding of managerial failure is developed and an empirical case study of managers who engage in the most popular managerial sporting activity, running, is used to theorise the process of learning to fail-well. The mixed-methods empirical study, using artefact elicitation participant data and autoethnographic authorial data, is detailed and suggestions for more reflexive managerial education are advanced.

After the seminar has concluded, Professor Black will lead an expert session workshop, titled 'Publishing Scholarship of Management Education: Insights Into the Expectations of the British Journal of Management, Management, Knowledge and Education and Studies in Higher Education'. This workshop will offer guidance for early career academics on publishing and research in this area.

The seminar is for an internal audience and will be held on 12 February 2026, 1:00pm, in room LG01 of the Henley Business School building, Whiteknights campus. For those unable to attend in person there is also the option to dial in remotely via Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in joining, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

LOBR research seminars are co-ordinated by Professor Bernd Vogel and Dr Anastasiya Saraeva.