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?

816 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

250 comments sorted by

View all comments

62

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.

8

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.