Your next senior role, part 1: decide what you won't trade before anyone calls

This series is for the people I coach and the market Recruise searches in, which is Director to VP leaders in India’s global capability centres. It runs in three parts: decide what you want, make yourself easy to understand, then put your network to work.

Moving at that level here has its own quirks. Notice periods of 60 to 90 days are common, and three months is standard in many contracts. Part of your pay may be stock in a parent company listed in another country. The role you want may not exist on any job board, because the centre it sits in hasn’t been announced yet. So the advice has to change shape.

This first part is about the work you do alone, before anyone calls. Part 2 covers how to make your case easy for other people to repeat, and part 3, out on 21 October, covers your network, the search firms, and the senior roles that are filled without being advertised.

The urge to leave arrives in waves, and a wave is poor evidence. For three weeks, write down each time you think about leaving, along with what had just happened. A steering committee where your plan was overruled by the parent? A Sunday evening dreading Monday’s 9pm call with the US? A recruiter’s message that flattered you?

Then read it back and sort each entry. Some are problems you can fix from your seat, like a skip-level who doesn’t know your work or a team gap you haven’t hired for. Others sit outside your control: the parent has decided to consolidate the centre’s charter, or your function is moving to a lower-cost site. If most entries are fixable, fix them first. You’ll either stay in a better job or leave with a stronger story.

Write down what you’d give up as well. In a GCC that list is often longer than people expect: unvested stock on a four-year schedule, a global sponsor who took years to earn, a centre you helped build from 40 people. None of it is a reason to stay. All of it belongs in the comparison when an offer arrives.

The most expensive search is the one a candidate runs without having decided. They take calls, reach a final round, accept an offer, and then accept their current employer’s counter. The new employer has lost three months, the consultant who made the introduction will be more careful next time, and the counter-offer often doesn’t settle the reason they started looking. We’ve written about what a senior counter-offer tells you if you want the longer version.

So make the call first. You can decide to stay, which is a perfectly good outcome of the log above. If you decide to go, say it to yourself plainly and set a rough window: ‘I want to be in a new role by the end of next year.’ That sentence changes how you take every call that follows. You start assessing the roles in front of you, where before you were collecting compliments.

I break a GCC role into six components, because the questions that decide whether a senior move works here are specific to how capability centres are run. For each, write your answer before you need it.

The charter is what the centre owns. A delivery centre executing work designed in Boston is a different job from one that owns a product line or a global process end to end. Ask whether the charter has grown in the past two years and who in the parent decided that. A shrinking charter will shrink your role with it, whatever the title says.

The reporting line decides most of your week. Will you report to the GCC head in India, to a global function head overseas, or both? Matrix lines are normal in GCCs. Work out which of those you prefer, and how many late-evening calls you’ll accept as standard.

The centre’s stage decides which kind of leader does well there. A first-year set-up rewards people who like hiring 60 people from nothing and writing the first policies. A centre in its eighth year rewards people who can rebuild something that already works. Both are good jobs for different people, and very few leaders are equally happy in each.

The work itself needs a specific answer. List what energises you and what drains you, and name the actual work. ‘Building teams’ is too broad. ‘Taking a 15-person team to 50 inside a year’ is a guardrail you can test a role against. Decide too whether you’d rather lead a whole function in a smaller centre or one part of a function in a larger one.

The people are the hardest one to assess in interviews, and often the reason a senior move goes wrong. Who will you report to, how long have they been in seat, and how did the last person in your role leave? That last question is fair to ask, and the way it gets answered tells you a lot.

The money needs three numbers. Set a floor, a target and a walk-away. Then decide on the mix: how much variable pay you’ll carry, how you value stock that vests over several years in a parent listed overseas, and whether you need a joining bonus to cover what you’ll forfeit. Benchmark against peers and the market, never against your current salary alone, which is what our Compensation Index is for.

Put the six headings in a table with three columns: must-have, tradeable, deal-breaker. You won’t get everything, so the tradeable column matters most. Maybe you’ll take a smaller team for a charter that owns a product. Maybe you’ll accept a global reporting line for a base 25% above your floor.

Keep it to one page and bring it to every first conversation. It gives you your questions, and it keeps a persuasive hiring manager from talking you out of something you decided on a calmer day. Interviews run both ways at this level. The company is assessing you, and the scorecard is how you assess them back.

In part 2, I’ll cover the document that does the opposite job: the one that tells a company, quickly, what you’re for. Until then, a question to sit with. Which of your six answers would you have written differently a year ago, and what changed?