Inside High-Performing GCCs: How Strategic Hubs Stand Out

India’s GCC ecosystem crossed 1,800 centers this year, employing over two million people. The provider-supported GCC market is on track to hit $40 billion by 2027, growing at around 25% annually (Everest Group, 2025). Nobody is questioning whether GCCs are a viable model anymore.

The question that’s worth asking is a harder one: How many of GCCS are genuinely shaping enterprise decisions, whereas others are just executing them? And the gap has widened considerably. Everest Group’s research puts fewer than 10% of GCCs at the top tier of strategic maturity.

The rest are stuck in the middle: functional, reliable, cost-effective, but not quite the innovation engines they were pitched as internally. This can’t be taken as a failure of talent or geography. It’s usually a failure of mandate, measurement, and leadership design. In this blog post, we will understand how top-performing GCCs function and what the top 10% are doing that the rest aren’t.

How GCCs Evolve From Support to Strategy

The majority of the GCCs were established with delivery in mind, having a defined scope, a cost target, and a headcount plan. With time, GCC centers now have the aspiration of becoming “innovation hubs”. But the problem is, without restructuring, this mandate becomes harder to achieve.

An Everest Group report states that companies often know how to set up a GCC but aren’t always clear on why or what it should evolve into. This ambiguity becomes expensive over time. Benefits go unmeasured, sponsors rotate, and the center ends up defending its existence with no real scoreboard to point at. To avoid this loop, GCC leaders need to have a clear mandate on what direction they are headed and what goals they are trying to achieve with their unit. Also, if the head office is in sync with it, or there is a push back.

The Shift in Leadership Expectations

The GCC leader roles have changed, but a lot of GCC enterprises are still hiring for the old version of it. GCCs don’t need leaders who protect headcount, avoid friction, and wait for direction. They need people willing to make hard calls on scope, operating models, and ownership, without needing HQ to hand them a playbook first. That’s a genuinely different profile from what most centers were hiring for five years ago.

There’s also something about the role that doesn’t get discussed enough. Leading a strategic GCC is a peculiar kind of pressure. You’re accountable to a headquarters that’s 5,000 miles away, to a local team watching how hard you fight for them, and to a broader enterprise that may not yet fully believe the center deserves more than execution responsibilities. The leaders who succeed have stopped waiting for that belief to arrive on its own.

The Difference in Day-to-Day Work in Strategic GCCs

A delivery GCC and a strategic GCC hub have different kinds of functions before anyone even explains it to you. The energy is different. Who’s initiating conversations versus responding to them is different. What people are accountable for is different.

In a delivery-oriented center, work flows down. HQ sends a backlog, a process gets offshored, and a team gets staffed. In a genuinely strategic GCC hub, work frequently originates from within the center: an engineer who flagged an inefficiency, a team that proposed a new approach, a product that a local squad now owns from ideation through release. McKinsey’s 2025 research report agrees that high-performing GCC enterprises aren’t just contributing to product development; they’re owning product lifecycles and managing global digital platforms directly.

The approach to talent has shifted, too. TransUnion’s experience, as described in McKinsey’s analysis, moved away from job-based recruitment toward skill-based hiring, deploying people for specific capabilities, not titles. The framing matters: you’re building a capability portfolio, not filling a headcount plan.

How Mature GCCs Measure Their Value

What you measure signals what you think you are. GCCs that track SLA compliance, cost per FTE, and headcount utilization are quietly telling their enterprise that delivery efficiency is the point. The centers that have moved beyond this are measuring something fundamentally different, and that shift in measurement is often what makes the strategic repositioning stick.

The question being asked in boardrooms in 2026 isn’t “how efficient is the center?” It’s “what did it contribute to the business?”, to revenue, to product quality, to speed, to customer outcomes. Mature GCCs are targeting a 4x to 6x return on cost in strategic work areas as part of GCC’s best practices, not just a cost reduction narrative. Internal NPS has emerged as a meaningful trust indicator. GCCs with an internal NPS above 50 are reportedly getting project approvals twice as fast, because they’re perceived as partners rather than vendors. That’s a measurable consequence of trust, and it compounds.

The structural shift worth paying attention to is the introduction of shared KPIs between the GCC and HQ. In product engineering, this means the center shares time-to-market and release velocity targets with headquarters, so both are on the hook for the same outcome. It removes the old dynamic where the GCC was graded on its contribution to work that HQ owned and controlled. ANSR’s report on integrated accountability models describes this as one of the more consequential operating model changes in high-performing centers.

The most honest indicator of a mature GCC isn’t on a dashboard. It’s whether the leadership team could walk into a room with GCC enterprise executives and explain without a deck, how the center made something better. Cost savings don’t answer that question anymore.

Conclusion

The GCC model isn’t going anywhere. But the version of it that just delivers reliably and keeps the lights on. As AI takes over more of what made delivery-oriented centers valuable, the economic case for a center with no strategic mandate gets harder to make. The centers that will matter in five years are the ones that are uncomfortable with being merely reliable right now. That discomfort, followed through on, is where GCC strategy actually begins. Want to learn more about GCCs, read our other blogs here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some GCCs never move beyond delivery roles?

Many GCCs remain stuck in delivery roles due to headquarters retaining decision-making authority, fostering a “vendor mindset” focused on cost metrics and execution over outcomes. Talent lacks business context, rigid processes stifle innovation, and immature governance prevents progression to strategic hubs, trapping 92% in early maturity stages.

What kind of leadership do strategic GCCs require?

Builders, not caretakers. Leaders with domain credibility, people who have a real point of view on the business, not just on the operation. People who can hold their own in a product or strategy conversation with enterprise peers and are comfortable making decisions without waiting for HQ to hand them a mandate. Strategic GCCs need visionary leaders with business acumen, tech expertise, and emotional intelligence. They drive maturity by securing decision rights, fostering innovation beyond delivery, aligning outcomes to P&L, and building cross-cultural teams for enterprise impact, elevating GCCs to hubs.

What signals indicate a GCC is truly strategic?

A few that go beyond the marketing: the center initiates work rather than just receiving it. GCC leaders are in global planning forums, not just briefed after decisions are made. Performance conversations involve business outcomes, product velocity, revenue contribution, customer impact, not just SLA scores. And the center has a recognizable identity inside the enterprise, not just among its immediate stakeholders.

Can GCCs influence enterprise-level decisions?

Yes, mature GCCs can and do influence enterprise-level decisions by owning end-to-end processes, shaping strategies in their expertise industry-wide. With decision rights and trust, they guide global roadmaps, KPIs, and transformations as strategic partners.

NLB Services