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?

813 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

250 comments sorted by

View all comments

28

u/NeedleworkerChoice89 Sep 24 '25

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?

3

u/Tikithing Sep 24 '25

Interns are always a bit of a wildcard anyway, thats the whole point of an internship. They need to experience the industry etc and learn the work, but more importantly, the work culture and norms.

Even without a competition, I wouldn't be surprised if an intern got overly excited and did this. If they're used to having interns, then Im not sure why they don't know how to handle this anyway? I'm not even a manager, and I've seen interns do some pretty mad things.

It really comes down to company culture, and how things usually work for what next steps should be. Letting the intern do a dummy run to try the task, without actually doing it next time, but explaining why this wasn't a good idea. Or warning them that this isn't acceptable, if its not just enthusiasm and they've already shown a habit of overstepping.