Client company context

Discovery Group is a business with a 30-year history in the Moldovan market that grew from a family company into several independent business lines:

• water and beverage production,
• distribution,
• a vending network,
• water delivery service,
• development of new product lines.

The companies within the business historically developed quite autonomously. For many years management was in the hands of the founding parents, and was later handed over to the younger generation — brothers who, in terms of the Adizes role model, form a balanced PE and AI management team.

By the time the project started, the business already held a leading position in the Moldovan market. But the owners had developed new ambitions:

• to move beyond the local market,
• to start playing on a larger scale,
• to build a more systematic and global business,
• to move beyond the existing product model.

And it was at exactly this point that it became clear the current management system wasn’t ready for such a transition.

At the start of the project, there was, in management terms, effectively no single group of companies:

• the different businesses operated separately,
• the executives of many of the companies had never worked together as a single team,
• there was no shared space for discussing common problems and decisions,,
• there was no shared management logic,
• many processes ran on personal agreements and the owners’ hands-on coordination.

The first stage of the project — the diagnostic — was, for some of the executives, the very first joint meeting of this group at all — and this caused serious tension and anxiety within the system.

At the same time, the company was already showing the typical symptoms of the Adizes «Go-Go» phase:

• blurred areas of responsibility,
• overload of key figures,
• a large number of initiatives without a shared system of priorities,
• conflicts between «old» and «new» approaches,
• resistance to change,
• and a constant sense that the business was becoming more complex faster than management could keep up with restructuring.

The company reached a point where further growth required not just entrepreneurial energy, but a transition to a more mature organizational system.

The client’s request and expectations

The core request was very mature and honest:

«We understood that if we wanted to play in the professional league now, we needed a completely different approach to managing the company.»

The company needed to:

• move from chaotic growth to a more systematic management model,
• increase efficiency ahead of the next stage of scaling,
• learn to implement change not «by intuition,» but in a managed way,
• build proper coordination between departments,
• reduce the overload on key figures,
• create the foundation for a more mature management culture.

At the same time, leadership understood well that the problem had long ago stopped being just about processes.

The problem was the company’s ability to reach agreement together, solve problems, and go through change.

In parallel with implementing change management, the company was carrying out two more major projects: creating a new organizational structure with a dedicated management company, and developing an overall strategy for the group and its individual business units.

How the project unfolded

The project was led by Irina Sotnikova.

The work lasted a year and a half and covered several major workstreams:

Organizational diagnostics

The team began with an in-depth diagnostic of:

• accumulated management problems,
• conflicts,
• overloads,
• communication breakdowns,
• weak points in the coordination system.

What mattered wasn’t just «describing the problems,» but making them visible to the management team itself.

Forming the POC (Organizational Development Committee)

An organizational development committee — the POC — was created within the company.

Its job was to:

• systematically work through the business’s real, accumulated difficulties,
• prioritize them, identify who is responsible for solving them, and provide them with resources,
• form teams capable of finding and implementing solutions to these problems,
• ensure synchronization and communication within the top management team.

This was a new experience for the company:
management problems started being discussed for the first time not in the corridors and emotionally, but as a working part of the management system.

Launching Synerteam

For problems sitting at the intersection of different functions, Synerteams were formed — cross-functional working groups.

And this is where the most important part of the change began.

People who previously:

• hardly interacted with one another,
• only defended their own turf,
• didn’t listen to each other,
• avoided difficult conversations,

started to:

• meet regularly,
• discuss real difficulties,
• look for solutions together,
• reach agreements,
• and implement changes together.

«People started not just discussing problems — they started solving them together. And that alone significantly changed part of the mindset inside the company.»

Supporting the implementation of change

The consultant’s role wasn’t limited to moderating processes.

The project required:

• holding the frame,
• working through resistance,
• withstanding emotional pressure,
• helping the company work through internal conflicts,
• and gradually forming a new culture of collaboration.

And all of this was happening inside a living company that kept growing fast and launching new projects. Teams were reassembled, new roles and people appeared, along with new structural units. This required constant adjustment and a high degree of flexibility from everyone involved in the project.

What turned out to be the hardest part

One of the project’s main challenges was that the changes turned out to run much deeper than the team initially expected.

«No one knows in advance just how deeply the changes will affect each individual person.».

In practice, the company ran into:

• resistance,
• emotional overload,
• fear of change,
• and the need to change not only processes, but their own management way of thinking.

What the company didn’t expect — but got

The most unexpected result wasn’t the implementation of tools.

It was the change in people’s behavior.

The team started to:

• initiate discussions of problems on its own,
• use the Synerteam approach within business units,
• sustain a culture of solving issues together,
• and see regular meetings as a valuable part of the new management system.

«When we said that we’d try moving forward on our own from here, people genuinely started worrying that these meetings would stop happening.»

For the company, this became a marker:
the changes had stopped being a «consultants’ project» — and had started becoming part of the internal culture.

Project results

• The company gained a working mechanism for implementing change
• A communication system between departments emerged
• People started learning to solve problems together, rather than just defending their own turf
• Management coordination grew stronger

The client himself separately notes:

«Without this part, moving into a new direction would most likely have been impossible.»

Summary and conclusion

This project wasn’t about «optimizing processes.»

It was about a much more complex task:
helping a fast-growing family business go through the painful transition from chaotic growth to a systematic management model.

At moments like these, it’s no longer enough for a company to have:

• strong owners,
• energy,
• speed,
• and the ability to «sort things out.»

What they need is a new organizational logic:

• coordination,
• manageability,
• systematic thinking,
• mature communication,
• the ability to go through change together..

And this is exactly the foundation Discovery began building within the project.

Sometimes the main result of implementing change isn’t a new structure or new processes. It’s that the company starts learning to be one team at the very moment the old ways of managing have stopped working.

Client quote

«Companies that find themselves at this kind of transitional stage shouldn’t go through it alone. When a business has grown quickly but the management system hasn’t kept pace with that growth, doing it on your own is very hard. It’s precisely at moments like these that support through change becomes critically important.».

Daniil,
CEO Discovery Group of Companies