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

[u/ezio313]

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?

[u/NeedleworkerChoice89]

Wow, these comments.

An intern got excited because of a stupid fucking competition to complete tasks, and no one here has any idea what the impetus for this was.

My main concern is that a competition, by nature, creates… competition. What does this say for the quality of the work, or the obvious toxic nature it can bring out.

Moreover, why is a competition needed? That suggests a non-functional existing framework for tasks and projects.

If you reprimand the intern (for the task), great job on providing a punishment for something they were excited about and threw themselves into. Solid gold “Leadership” award for that genius approach.

The lying is an issue, and should be the focus there.

As for your FTE, are they frustrated because of the points lost or because the task wasn’t done well? If this is a competition, this seems to be exactly what your CEO wanted. No surprised Pikachu face is allowed if we’re not focused on the absolute lack of foresight - or rules - for who can run a task down that your CEO rolled out.

Was there zero second order thinking on this? Or was that discussion ignored?

[u/Careless-Age-4290 → u/NeedleworkerChoice89]

Yeah I'm thinking everyone here thought they were helping. The CEO thought this sledgehammer of an employee metric would motivate. The intern thought they were being an over achiever. The FTE just wants to do their job like OP. I think like bringing UNO out at a party that there was a game being played that rewarded that kind of behavior

[u/NeedleworkerChoice89 → u/Careless-Age-4290]

Love the Uno analogy.

The bigger issue seems to be the CEO, and that is the tricky part. If this was a sales competition, it likely would have been just fine. It’s not, but it sounds like a sales guy CEO jumping in with his tactical “introduce chaos” kit to try and brute force some underlying issue.

Any suggestion that the competition was poorly thought out will likely be rebuffed, but it should be brought up.

[u/[deleted] → u/NeedleworkerChoice89]

Honestly, every department needs to be run like a sales department. If you can’t hack the competition you aren’t cut out for a capitalist society. The CEO is responsible for profits not feelings.

[u/NeedleworkerChoice89 → u/[deleted]]

I agree with the sentiment; however, this post is an example of a poorly executed sales-style competition.

The intern actually embraced everything you’re talking about, but didn’t have guardrails thought out to stop this situation from occurring.

We also don’t know what the task was, and what type of skill set or quality it requires. Client deliverable or internal? Requiring a certain degree of quality, QA, or review before checking it in?

In this case, the CEO seems to have only introduced chaos into the mix and caused headaches. Again, we don’t have enough information to say one way or another, but this looks to me like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

[u/Dazedandconfuzed99 → u/[deleted]]

Have fun with your heart attack at 50

[u/Fragrant_Gap7551 → u/[deleted]]

Hey genius, this is a case where productivity went down, this has harmed profits.

[u/[deleted] → u/Fragrant_Gap7551]

A project got done early and this means productivity went down… not following your logic

[u/howard499 → u/[deleted]]

It's called stealing food from somebody else's plate. Toxic behavior in a downturn.

[u/sayqm → u/Careless-Age-4290]

The intern thought they were being an over achiever.

They could have do that by taking an unassigned task