Great Employees Don't Do What They're Told

In the past year, ownership and autonomy are terms Brandon and I have used a lot at ZAR. For us, their meaning feels implicit - a product of careers spent in entrepreneurial ventures. But I’ve learned that a shared vocabulary doesn’t guarantee a shared understanding. Definitions don’t bridge the gap experience does.

This has pushed me to find better ways to articulate what these principles look like in practice. This post is one of those attempts, built on a counter-intuitive idea:

Great employees don’t do what they're told.

To understand why, we have to start with a simple premise:

When someone brings you a frustration or a directive, they are almost always describing a symptom. “My partner [girlfriend/boyfriend] never texts me.” “I get headaches every morning.” “Customers are leaving bad reviews.” We frame these as problems, but they’re not. They are the surface-level effects of deeper issues that have yet to be identified.

If you take these statements at face value, you’re missing the point. The friend who responds, “You should just break up with them,” is offering a simplistic fix that ignores the actual relationship dynamics. They’re being a reactionary, not an advisor.

This is no different from a doctor who prescribes a pill for every ailment without investigation. “Headache? Here’s an Advil. Dizziness? Here’s some Antivert.” This isn’t medicine; it’s malpractice. The doctor is reacting to symptoms instead of diagnosing the root cause - which may very well be as simple as chronic dehydration.

This same malpractice happens in companies every day. We’re constantly surrounded by symptoms. A bug report isn’t a problem; it’s a symptom. A feature request is rarely a solution; it's a prescription written without a diagnosis. This isn’t a fault. It’s the natural way organizations flag that something is wrong.

The communication is a handoff - an act of trust. They’re implicitly asking you to do more with the information than they could. Most people waste this opportunity by simply treating the symptom(s) they were told.

This brings us back to the core idea. Great employees don’t do what they're told because they understand their job is not to be an order-taker who simply manages symptoms. Their job is to be a diagnostician who uncovers the real problem. When a bug report about a minor error comes in, they don’t just patch it. They investigate whether it signals a deeper infestation. If it does, they address the root cause, strengthening the underlying system to eliminate entire classes of future symptoms.

The average employee addresses symptoms. The great employee cures the disease.

While I'm framing this around employees, the principle is universal. It applies to the friend responding to a gripe, the partner reacting to frustration, the business owner fielding customer feedback. Anyone who interfaces with other people is constantly being handed symptoms. What separates the transactional from the transformative is whether they stop at the surface or diagnose the cause and cure it.

So when I say we want ownership and autonomy at ZAR, this is what I mean. It’s not a call to simply “go do tasks independently.” It’s a call to reject the order-taker mentality. Don’t just treat the symptoms. Take ownership of the problem they represent. Diagnose it, understand it, and solve it in a way that makes the entire system more robust.

That is how you provide lasting value. That is how you own your work.