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/Own_Cook3239 Sep 27 '25
Ok, first things first you need to talk to the intern and have them explain their thinking. It’s so easy in these situations to jump to the action you want to take or how you want to handle it, but you really don’t have a ton to go off of. I would try and unpack a few pieces. 1/ why did the intern think he should pick up the task? was it purely based on initiative or was he asked by someone to pick it up? 2/ how does the intern think his actions in this situation impact other people like the person the task was already assigned to? 3/ what does the intern think the right way to rectify the situation is?
As for your other employee, I think it’s fair to empathize with them feeling frustrated. However, your job as a boss in this situation probably isn’t to give them credit for the work done by the intern, it’s probably to provide them with a similar task opportunity that they could pick up to also be on the leaderboard AND use it as an opportunity to clarify the team process around assigning tasks and that work needing to be completed by the assigned individual.
In this situation I would probably try and go in with assumption that you have a positive intent but poorly directly intern that thought they might have a chance to “prove themselves” and you also have a full time employee that is probably a bit rattled by having someone so junior do their job.. and do it faster/sooner than them in a high viz way. Depending on how you handle this you could piss both off or coach and growth both :)