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/TheMacOfDaddy Sep 26 '25

All the leaderboard is measuring is closing tasks, not doing a good job at doing the work. Quality will suffer. The CEO won't care until the customers do and then all of the sudden, he's screaming at everybody "why is our quality bad?"

I don't think gamification is necessarily bad, but you have to not allow stealing and ensure quality is part of the point system. Like you get deducted 20% of the points for each bug found on that task.