I’ve taken a bit of time to try and come to my own thoughts on Walters’ role and I’m not sure I have my perspective nailed down even now. But some thoughts and observations, regardless…
I was really reserved about Walters’ initial appointment. My initial reaction was that had he not played for us he wouldn’t have gotten a sniff, Stoke seem to have appointed experienced heads to those level of roles historically. While I don’t subscribe to the idea that inexperience should necessarily preclude someone in and of itself, the worry was the motivation for his appointment and the lack of clarity as to whether it was based on his ability for this role or his history in other roles with us.
More recently, the way we’ve gone through head of departments recently is staggering. Simply sacking everyone can be construed as ruthless, but another angle perhaps points towards a lack of ability by the Director(s) to run a team, manage performance and cultivating the talents already employed into helping the strategic path you want to take and to embed it. In short, to me it suggests either an appalling level of attention to detail in the hiring process or an inability to manage their performance by the senior leaders.
Given the varying years of service of the people who have departed, I’d suggest the hiring process isn’t the issue - these people who have left will have served under different regimes and been hired by different people. Furthermore, it’s difficult to believe every single person sacked was either incapable of doing their job, or guilty of some form of misconduct - to my mind this therefore points more to a refusal or inability to develop those incumbent at the time as Department Heads.
For balance, I’m hesitant to think that someone is good simply because they’ve been somewhere for a while. Familiarity often breeds resistance to change. For example, the old adage of “We’ve always done it this way…” is the most reductive argument, to me it offers nothing other than an acceptance that you might have done something wrong for a while. There may be valid reasons to move on someone who has been in post for a while, and those actively resisting change which Directors are trying to implement without good cause are better out of the way than in it.
Part of me thinks that there has been a malaise at the club which Walters and others of his seniority are cleansing. Part of me thinks they’re becoming more and more authoritarian, incapable of handling challenge to their thoughts. These things are rarely binary.
Football people often talk about non-Football people going into a Football environment and how they don’t “get it”. You can probably flip that for an office role and a football person like Walters. It’s highly unlikely that anyone ever goes into their first role in a business as a Director having been on the shop floor.
My niggling concern now is what the culture at the football club is like now. Is there a them-and-us mindset between new and old staff? Is there a culture where problems can be raised without fear of reprisals? Are the Board of Directors capable of handling bumps in the road without sacking another batch of Department Heads? Hell, have we got a raft of employment tribunals in the pipeline?
I guess most of these musings will never see the light of day, and probably shouldn't if the club operates like a regular business. But regular businesses don’t have >30,000 people scrutinising words, decisions and rumours in the most exhaustive of details.