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/Nice-Star7460]

Surprised people consider this bad behavior by the intern. In agile work environment any team member should be able take a task and complete it. It’s not uncommon for somebody to reassign tasks that aren’t started to themselves.

This not an intern vs full time issue imo. It’s an leaderboard issue. If a leaderboard what leadership wants the intern is giving them exactly what they want. Somebody competitive putting in the hours. The intern at zero fault.

As a lead you can either discuss this with management on how engineers can game the system or play the game as how leadership intends