Global Capability Centres (GCCs) today operate in a fast-evolving business landscape shaped by complex customer demands, innovation imperatives, regulatory pressures, and intense competition. For GCCs to thrive and deliver sustained value, their learning and skilling strategies must begin with an understanding of these external realities. Only then can they align talent development accordingly.
Our team has spent over 5 years partnering with GCCs across industries. We’ve observed how external business priorities directly shape the behaviours and skills that drive performance. Drawing from these insights, they have developed a mindset-driven framework. It links the evolving business demands GCCs face to specific talent mindsets and skilling needs.
Business Drivers and the Four Mindsets for GCC Talent Building
What does it mean to be mindset-driven in how we approach skilling?
At its core, it means shifting the focus from just building capabilities to understanding how people show up to work. A mindset defines the lens through which an individual approaches problems, collaborates with others, and takes ownership of outcomes.
In GCCs, where roles evolve rapidly and expectations are shaped by global business needs, a mindset-driven approach helps link skilling efforts directly to business context. It allows organizations to go beyond generic training and instead build the specific behaviours, habits, and ways of thinking that different roles demand at different stages of maturity.
Rather than ask, “What skills do we need to teach?”, a mindset-driven approach asks, “What kind of thinking, ownership, and decision-making do we want to see — and what skills will reinforce those behaviours?”
With this perspective, we’ve identified four distinct mindsets that align with the external business imperatives faced by most GCCs:
- Reliable Support: The Foundation for Business Stability
At its core most GCC’s value proposition is the need to provide consistent, accurate, and dependable execution of critical processes. This mindset responds to the external imperative for operational excellence and risk mitigation. Skilling in this area focuses on building a strong service mindset, accountability, communication skills, and effective time management. This ensures that the centre can reliably support global business functions, meeting exacting standards and compliance needs.
- Revenue Maximizer: Meeting Market Growth Expectations
GCCs increasingly contribute directly to revenue growth through scaling throughput, optimizing resource allocation, and accelerating billing cycles. This mindset responds to the external demand for efficiency and profitability within existing business models. Skilling here includes data-driven decision-making, financial acumen, negotiation, conflict resolution, and stakeholder management—equipping talent to drive measurable business impact within current frameworks.
. This is how we worked on the revenue maximizer mindset:
We worked with a global life sciences firm to design and deliver a negotiation skills program for a cross-regional, cross-functional cohort. The objective was clear: enable teams to negotiate more effectively in complex, high-value scenarios—without compromising on compliance or stakeholder relationships.
The program was built around real-life negotiation contexts and emphasized practical application. Participants engaged in simulated negotiations, received structured feedback, and applied a clear decision-making framework grounded in commercial realities.
Within weeks of implementation, managers reported increased confidence in managing price conversations, greater clarity in identifying trade-offs, and improved ability to close negotiations in shorter cycles.
This initiative demonstrated how targeted skill development—in areas such as financial acumen, stakeholder alignment, and conflict resolution—can support revenue impact within existing business models. Read more about it here.
- Problem Solver: Addressing Complex Challenges in a Competitive Market
With rising complexity in products and services, GCCs are called upon to solve increasingly challenging problems. This mindset aligns with the external pressure to innovate, reduce costs, and improve customer outcomes through expertise and critical thinking. Skilling areas include advanced problem solving, decision-making, and the interpersonal skills of persuasion and influence, enabling teams to navigate ambiguity and build solutions that meet dynamic market needs.
Here is another great example of how we used the problem solver mindset to provide solutions:
We partnered with a global technology services firm to design a board-based business simulation that helped mid-level managers strengthen their decision-making and problem-solving capabilities.
Through multi-cycle simulations, participants navigated complex trade-offs across pricing, talent, operations, and customer delivery—mirroring real-world ambiguity and interdependencies. The experience reinforced systems thinking, strategic alignment, and the ability to influence outcomes in dynamic contexts. Read more about it here.
- Value Creator: Driving Breakthrough Innovation and New Business Models
At the strategic frontier, GCCs face the external imperative to not just improve existing processes but to create entirely new value streams and business models. The Value Creator mindset embodies this transformational role. Skilling priorities focus on creativity, design thinking, first-principle thinking, storytelling, and stakeholder influence. These capabilities help GCC talent lead innovation, influence stakeholders globally, and co-create future-ready solutions that open new revenue opportunities.
These mindsets help organizations identify where their talent is today — and what capabilities they need to build now to thrive in the next phase of growth.
Our Co-Founder, Ajay Gupta, recently spoke on this at a session titled “Skilling for Scale and Strategy”. In it, he highlighted how India’s GCCs are at a pivotal moment — and how skilling at scale, anchored in the four mindsets, is the key to staying ahead.
🎧 Take a listen to this short excerpt from his talk:
Cross-Cutting Capabilities & Leadership Development for an Interconnected World
Regardless of mindset, GCC talent must develop collaboration skills, cultural fluency, compliance awareness, and agility. These cross-cutting capabilities reflect the external reality of global teams working across geographies and regulatory environments, adapting quickly to changing conditions.
Other common capability critical for GCC success is Leadership Development. Recent surveys highlight that 81% of GCC respondents see leadership development as a critical challenge. Moreover, 48% emphasize the need for strong local leaders who combine cultural fluency, strategic acumen, and business knowledge to translate global strategy into locally relevant execution.
This leadership gap reflects the external business need for resilient, agile leaders who can bridge global and local demands while fostering psychological safety, purposeful career conversations, and a culture of feedback.
The way forward:
Skilling in GCCs can no longer be driven solely by internal assessments or legacy training models. Instead, starting from the external business realities and working inward to define the mindsets and behaviours needed creates a powerful alignment between talent development and business success.
By applying the Four Mindsets framework through an outside-in lens, organisations can ensure their learning strategies are not only relevant today but also future-ready—fueling operational excellence, revenue growth, problem solving, and breakthrough innovation.
Marketing Manager | Skills Cafe