Bank of America built its success by leveraging different elements of bank deregulation to grow the company into a national bank in the U.S., one of the country's largest. The driving force behind this success was visionary leadership at the top of the company and the ability to integrate a high growth platform with multiple acquisitions at the more functional managerial levels of the company. Thus, the company's leadership development program has been instrumental to its run of success. There are seven components to Bank of America's leadership development program. The company believes that leaders matter, especially with respect to creating systems of accountability. The company believes in creating strong links between performance and reward, and it therefore sees talent as a critical enterprise resource. Flowing from the performance orientation, the company recognizes that today's leaders are not necessarily the ones that will lead tomorrow. The company believes that experience is the best teacher. To that end, Bank of America also has a philosophy of teaching its future leaders, through mentorship programs. The company also believes in "invest in the best and focus the rest," a talent management philosophy that emphasizes the top performers for top roles, and gearing the other leaders towards more functional tasks (Knighton & Krupp, 2008).

Fishel and Conger (2010) outlines how the company emphasizes its learning and mentorship programs...

The company has developed a program that focuses on developing internal leadership talent pools. Feedback and learning is an essential part of the process, and so too is coaching. Good leaders build from experience, but it is important that those experiences are converted into learning moments. In addition, those with the experience currently are to assist in the process of passing down that experience to the next generation of leaders within the company.
As the company has expanded globally, Bank of America has expanded its leadership training program globally as well. Bank of America has adopted a global leadership philosophy based on three essential ideas. These are that the company should create global constituencies, that there are cultural distinctiveness elements that add value to the firm's leadership and that individual must take ownership of their careers and their division (Carter, 2012). Again, these ideas underscore the company's philosophy of independence among leaders, the ability to take control of situations and deliver results.

Strengths of the Program

There is a tough love component to the program that is one of its strengths. The Bank of America program offers investment in those deemed to have the highest leadership potential, and this allows the company to continually develop new in-house talent. The philosophy that today's leaders are not necessarily…