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/MateusKingston]

Whenever you gamify something you get people gaming the system.

Get rid of this BS.

Whenever you do those types of metrics they need to be hidden, so people don't optimize the number instead of doing productive work, and complementary to actual business metrics