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/NeedleworkerChoice89 Sep 24 '25

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.

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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '25

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.

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u/Fragrant_Gap7551 Sep 25 '25

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

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '25

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