When Bain & Company asked senior executives from 308 large companies how they form teams for their most important initiatives, most told us they assemble teams based on whoever is available. Only a small minority indicated that they consistently create all-star teams, comprised of their very best talent, to tackle their company’s highest-priority issues. This is an enormous missed opportunity: we found that the best companies are more than 25% more productive than the rest due to the way they deploy, team and lead scarce, difference-making talent.

Here’s what our research shows:

The best talent is significantly more productive than the rest. Most of us know from experience that our best players are much better than our average teammates. But we may not fully recognize just how much better they are.

For creative or highly unstructured work, the best can be 8 to 12 times as productive as the average. The best software developer at Apple, for example, writes nine times more useable code each day than the average software engineer in Silicon Valley. But even for routine or highly repetitive work, the difference in productivity can be significant. The best fish butcher at Le Bernardin restaurant in New York can butcher three times as much fish per hour as the average prep cook in Manhattan.