How do you build a senior leadership team in GCC, India?

A GCC can have a strong leadership bench on paper and still not work as a leadership team.

The Head of HR reports to the global HR leader. The Finance Head reports to the CFO overseas. Technology reports into the global technology organisation, and Operations has its own line. Each leader knows their job, their stakeholders and what they’ll be measured on.

So where does the India leadership team sit?

The leaders are in India. Their authority, accountability and most of their key relationships are not. Getting them into the same room is easy. Getting them to run the India organisation together, while each one still answers to a different boss abroad, is the hard part.

When everyone has a different boss

A functional leader will put their function and their global stakeholder first. That’s how a global organisation is meant to work.

The trouble starts when the India business needs something that cuts across functions. Who owns the decision? Who speaks for India to the global organisation? Who settles competing priorities? And when a decision touches the whole India operation, is each leader thinking as Head of Finance or HR, or as someone responsible for the whole centre?

That question separates a group of senior leaders from a leadership team. A group sits together, shares updates and attends the same meetings. A team feels it owns the organisation it leads.

From functional leader to enterprise leader

The biggest shift for a senior leader in a GCC is looking past their own function. It usually happens in three steps:

“I am responsible for Finance.”
“What does Finance need to enable for the India business?”
“What does the India business need from me as a member of its leadership team?”

None of this means caring less about the function. Technology still has to protect technology priorities. HR still owns people and organisation. Finance still has to hold the line on money. The enterprise view sits alongside those jobs. Without it, every leadership meeting turns into a negotiation between functions.

How do you manage too many responsibilities after a promotion?

This is another question that comes up frequently.

The first instinct is often to work longer hours, but that does little to solve the problem if every responsibility continues to depend on you.

A better starting point is to ask, “What actually requires my attention because of the role I now hold?”

Some responsibilities need your direct involvement. Others need your judgment, while many can be delegated to people who are capable of taking greater ownership.

Learning to make these distinctions is one of the most important changes during the first 90 days.

Why the first 90 days matter

Ninety days is not enough time to master a leadership role, but it is enough time for your team to start forming expectations about how you lead.

People notice whether you listen before deciding, whether you step in too quickly, whether you give others room to take ownership and how you respond when things go wrong.

Those early patterns can become habits for the team, which is why the first few months are a useful time to deliberately establish how you want to work.

Agreeing how you'll lead together

A leadership team needs a shared idea of what it means to lead the India organisation. That sounds obvious. In practice it’s often missing.

Leaders bring different ideas of good leadership. Some push for speed, others watch risk. Some like to decide together, others prefer to decide alone. Those differences make for good debate once the team has agreed how it works. Until then, they cause friction.

So the team needs clear answers to a few basic questions:

How will decisions be made?
What needs collective discussion?
What can each leader decide alone?
How will disagreements be handled?
What does accountability across functions look like?
How will the team stand behind a decision once it’s made?

They look like admin. Answering them is how trust gets built.

Managing across, not just up

GCC leaders spend a lot of time managing stakeholders in the UK, the US or wherever HQ sits. They need to understand global priorities, report India’s progress and influence decisions that affect their function.

Their peers in India are stakeholders too, and they get far less attention.

A leader can manage upwards very well and still cause friction at home. They win a global decision for their function without checking what it does to another function. Or they escalate an issue straight to HQ before trying to sort it out with the India team. Each move looks reasonable on its own. Repeated across a team, they wear down the whole leadership system.

Senior leaders have to manage up, across and sometimes down at the same time. Good communication helps, but mostly this comes down to judgement.

The Country Manager and HR trap

The Country Manager and HR trap

This is where the Country Manager’s job gets hard. When functional leaders report globally, the Country Manager is often expected to create alignment without direct authority over the people who need aligning.

HR often lands in the same spot: brokering conversations, settling tensions, connecting leaders and turning global expectations into local action.

The risk is that one of them slowly becomes the person holding the whole team together. That doesn’t last. Collaboration and shared ownership have to belong to every member of the team.

How the India team shows up

One more piece is easy to miss: how the India leadership team comes across to HQ.

If global stakeholders mostly deal with individual functional leaders, they end up with a fragmented picture of India. A mature team can put forward one collective view. That takes leaders who can speak clearly and hold a point of view, disagree without damage, influence without relying on rank, handle hard conversations, and build credibility with global stakeholders while speaking for the organisation and not just their function.

People call these soft skills. At this level, they’re how the job gets done.

What building the team takes

There’s no single fix. The work usually covers four areas:

A professional foundation. Clear roles, decision rights, expectations and ways of working.
A shared leadership identity. Leaders accept that their responsibility goes beyond their own function.
Stakeholder management. Leaders learn to handle the pull between global accountability and local needs.
Interpersonal capability. Influence, communication, conflict management, executive presence and collaboration matter more as authority gets spread out.

Nobody needs to think alike. The team needs enough shared ownership that different views still move the organisation in one direction.

The question to ask

The useful question for a GCC isn’t “Do we have strong senior leaders in India?”

It’s this: if your global stakeholders spoke to you as one India leadership team tomorrow, could you give them one clear view of where the organisation is going?

If the answer is unclear, you may have the structure. You don’t have the team yet.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a GCC leadership team need to work on?
Five areas: foundation, organisation leadership, stakeholder management, soft skills, and business and functional knowledge. Each one comes with a simple question leaders can ask themselves.

What does “foundation” mean for senior leaders?
It means how leaders behave on the floor: their conduct, their ethics, and whether they do what they ask others to do. The test is simple. Do my standards hold when no one is checking?

How is organisation leadership different from functional leadership?
A functional leader looks after their own function. An organisation leader acts for the company as a whole and works across functions to get things done. The test: do I decide for the organisation, even when my function pays for it?

How do GCC leaders manage stakeholders they have no authority over?
Most of the people they need to move sit in HQ or in other functions. So they have to lead through influence, not reporting lines. The test: can I move people who don’t report to me?

Which soft skills matter most at this level?
Resilience, ownership, managing people, and emotional intelligence. These matter most when things go wrong. The test: do I stay composed and own the outcome?

Why do leaders need to understand the business and the GCC model?
A leader who can’t explain why their work is done in India will struggle to defend it with HQ. This pillar covers investing in your own growth, knowing the wider business, understanding how the GCC model works, and building depth in your own function. The test: can I explain why this work sits in a GCC?

About the author

Moumita Gokhale is an executive coach and leadership facilitator based in Pune, India. She works with senior leaders across the globe who are navigating pivotal transitions, and with organisations building leadership capability at scale.

A large part of that work sits inside global capability centres, where she helps India leadership teams build the standing, stakeholder relationships and shared ownership that the reporting structure does not give them.

Her corporate programmes are delivered through Attrans Management Solutions.

Website: www.moumitagokhale.com Read more of her writing: moumitagokhale.com/guidance Connect on LinkedIn

If you are building one senior leadership team in a centre where everyone reports somewhere else, that is the work she does. Book a 30 minute conversation.

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Moumita Gokhale