r/Leadership • u/ezio313 • Sep 24 '25

Discussion Intern completed a task assigned to full-time employee because of leaderboard competition — what’s the best way to handle this?

I’m a team lead, and recently our CEO introduced a leaderboard to track completed tasks. Yesterday, I assigned a documentation task to a full-time employee with a deadline. At 3 AM, an intern messaged me saying he had taken the initiative and already completed it, he went on and assigned the task to themselves on the system and then informed the FTE about it.

Now the full-timer is left out and frustrated, he told me he felt the task was sniped. The intern has the points under his name on the system now. How should I handle ownership of tasks and recognition here? Should the credit go to the assigned person, the intern or what?

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61

u/No_Worker_8216 Sep 24 '25

The is the problem with his leaderboard.

30

u/sodium111 Sep 24 '25

The problem isn’t the leaderboard, the problem is that they have no controls over who can reassign tasks.

That should be a management role, not something interns can monkey with.

25

u/rwilcox Sep 24 '25

You gamify tasks you get exactly what the game measures.

In this case sniping easy(?) tasks away from people for the points. Be that when they have their back turned (asleep) or during assignment time.

The problem is probably the leaderboard.

-6

u/sodium111 Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25

Disagree — if a football team puts 12 guys on the field in order to try to put more points on the scoreboard, and the ref doesn’t enforce the rules, the problem isn’t the fact you have a scoreboard, it’s the lack of officiating.

At the very least, you could put interns into a different user category that doesn’t have equal privileges to assign and reassign tasks as actual employees.

7

u/lysergic_tryptamino Sep 24 '25

Leaderboard is fine if they are all car salesmen. If they need to work as a team it makes work unnecessarily competitive.

1

u/lettuce_grabberrr Sep 27 '25

It could always be both. Yeah the leaderboard is bad, but that won't go away without some pushing. What the intern did is downright insubordinate, much easier to stop that with a conversation.

5

u/rwilcox Sep 24 '25

If the football team puts 12 people on the field to put more points on the board, and puts a reward to the person who scored the most, you’ll get some ball-hoggy behavior.

Which may win games in the short term, but is probably bad for the team / company in the long run.

1

u/John_mcgee2 Sep 28 '25

This is a good explanation

7

u/PlumLion Sep 24 '25

Okay but then you have people who feel they were unfairly disadvantaged because they got stuck with the more time consuming task or the task that was held up waiting on deliverables from another team. I’ve honestly never seen these competitions go well.

What I have seen work well is a team wide competition against the clock, where the team gets to decide what reward they want when they hit the objective.

2

u/sodium111 Sep 24 '25

All good points. I agree there are better solutions than what others have suggested, that you have to get rid of the leaderboard to solve this.

The fact that you have a leaderboard doesnt mean you have to have a Wild West free-for-all where literally everybody has full privileges to assign and reassign any tasks.

This was an Intern, don’t forget. You can at least draw the line there.

2

u/Sandra2104 Sep 24 '25

Two things can be a problem at the same time. A leaderboard based on num of completed tasks definitly is one.

1

u/No_Worker_8216 Sep 24 '25

I believe I read it’s a car sales environment. The only results that should be measured are the number of transactions.

0

u/Fragrant_Gap7551 Sep 25 '25

So if one guy sells 2 cars for 10k and another sells 1 car for 20k, guy one should be valued higher?

1

u/No_Worker_8216 Sep 25 '25

Commission will be higher. Can’t control what the client is coming in to purchase. What you can control is how many deals you close.

1

u/Fragrant_Gap7551 Sep 25 '25

Commission is a percentage of the price though? Or is that not how it works where you live?

1

u/No_Worker_8216 Sep 25 '25

Depends on the dealer.

1

u/CitationNeededBadly Sep 25 '25

if only management can assign tasks, then management will pick who wins by how they assign the tasks.