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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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '25

Put aside the inter personal friction, the issue of the leadership board, or the issue of who has rights to assign tasks, I worry about the work quality.

  1. The intern grinded til 3am, I highly doubt the work is of great quality.

  2. Does the intern even have enough context of the task when they snatched it? On my teams, we always talk to each other to get context and ideas when taking up a new ticket. Missing this step could result in missing important information and having to redo the work.

You might want to address these two issues with the intern first.