More With Less: How To Get The Best From Your Extra-milers

In teams, not all members are made equal. Certain individuals try harder, speak up, help others and generally go beyond the call of duty. These ‘extra milers’ are gold-dust when it comes to creating a high-performance culture ; not only do they produce more (research estimates that the top 5% of performers are responsible for 26% of a company’s output ), their behavior also has a multiplicative effect on the rest of the team. The good news for leaders is that instead of recruiting an entire workforce of extra-milers (an impossible task), they can increase team effectiveness by leveraging the impact of the minority of extra-milers they have. This means putting them at the center of a network where they can influence as many of their colleagues as possible. So how can you harness the vital few to impact your organization as a whole? Researchers at the University of Iowa looked at the performance and creativity of 87 manufacturing teams in a large petrochemical company in China. They asked each team member to rate the extent to which each of their colleagues helped and supported them with their work, and spoke up to change the status quo – two typical behaviors of extra milers. Participants also reported how much they relied on each of their colleagues to get their work done – a measure of every individual’s position in the team network.