Emerging leadership landscape in GCCs: Standing out in disruptive times
India GCCs need to invest in creating strong & deep leadership pools across levels by making them equipped with contemporary state-of-the-art leadership programmes, ecosystem exposure and business acumen and building C-level advocacy.
In today’s world, GCCs are at an inflexion point, as the pace at which Gen AI is changing every aspect is ramping up exponentially. GCCs are contextually empowered with critical and strategic business capabilities. They are rapidly evolving as enterprise transformation hubs and are beginning to be at the centre of the AI-driven transformation wave.
GCCs’ ability to provide strategic capacity at scale and play a key role in future-proofing enterprises equipped with top-of-the-line leadership skills is proving to be the secret sauce for their success.
Being at the helm of a GCC is an arduous task and onerous responsibility wherein multifarious skills, competencies and attributes are required to build, scale and transform the centre. Building novel operating models for future-fit GCCs will be characterised by strategic planning, complex capability building, designing bespoke AI-led technology architecture, driving C-level advocacy, Value & Transformation accentuation, inclusive talent building & intensive corporate development.
Building scalable & resilient leadership & talent in GCCs in disruptive times for sustained performance is the need of the hour. The jobs of today will not be the jobs of tomorrow—GenAI is rewriting the leadership & talent code architecture of GCCs rapidly.
Setup, scale and sustenance trajectories of GCCs require out-of-the-box outlooks and perspectives to stay relevant. With the new renditions of GCCs evolving, GCC leaders need to reimagine the skills, competencies and attributes that are required to build top-notch, talented teams, devise novel business and technology processes to work in unison with parent organisations and develop new initiatives & interventions for GCCs to stay ahead of the curve.
The age of AI is upon us. Businesses are now looking towards AI for transformative outcomes. Global Capability Centres (GCCs) leaders are specifically investing & building AI capabilities and teams that will not only bring in efficiencies across multiple processes for parent organisations, but also unlock new revenue streams that will deliver quantum bottom-line impact. With AI–driven GCCs becoming the new norm, people need to embrace new leadership skills to manage a new next-gen GCC.
Further, within the existing GCCs, there is a huge need to ramp up leadership skill development interventions. The traditional roles of leaders in GCCs are rapidly changing as they are expected to stay in step with the developments in the world of AI. Business leaders in GCCs are now needed to deeply understand the potential of AI and translate it into a viable roadmap for the business.
We are seeing a fast proliferation of AI evangelists and transformation officers in GCCs that are charged with developing a framework within which the future of talent will operate.
For GCCs to usher in the future of- AI-driven workforce, GCC leaders need to ensure that a few key enablers come together. GCCs need to expand the scope of executive leadership education and the courseware that goes with it.
Next, they need to seriously consider the potential impact of shorter, tactical courses in GenAI . GCCs need to augment their training programmes with shorter, time-boxed courseware that can deliver instant impact for the organisation.
Finally, they need to reimagine multiple, personalised AI career pathways. They need to move away from the traditional one-size-fits-all training and deliver more tailored, fit-for-purpose and relevant education to employees.
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The future of work in GCCs is unleashing new roles wherein data custodians and AI at scale engineers are put to work to develop the technology that powers the business of the future.
On the macro level, we are seeing rapid changes in the paradigm of GCC staffing as well. With the gig economy in full force, we are seeing more dynamic team compositions – where individuals with varied skill sets are required to continuously augment teams on a need basis. Advances in the fields of technology and management typically require large-scale transformation in the manner in which GCCs manage their workforce.
On the micro level, we are seeing that increased instances of automation are requiring GCC leaders to build and scale blended teams comprising humans and AI. This disruption requires a paradigm shift in how the future workforce is managed in GCCs.
Teams in GCCs in the future will showcase increased diversity and will be more interdisciplinary than ever before. Managing teams, careers and coaching for improved performance in the future will require a new set of metrics. Change evangelists need to devise these metrics, which will be imperative to how the workforce of the future is managed.
GCC leaders also need to have tight alignment with the parent organisation’s leadership to create a common set of business strategic imperatives that could pave the way for Indian GCC leadership to contribute strongly to the parent organisation's top & bottom line. India GCCs need to invest in creating strong & deep leadership pools across levels by making them equipped with contemporary state-of-the-art leadership programmes, ecosystem exposure and business acumen and building C-level advocacy. This involves a structured approach by India GCCs to curate individual leadership programmes that are personalised and customised.
(Sameer Dhanrajani is the CEO of AIQRATE & 3AI.)
Edited by Jyoti Narayan