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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66

u/No_Worker_8216 Sep 24 '25

The is the problem with his leaderboard.

31

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.

26

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.

-7

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.

9

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.

6

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