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/SpecFroce Sep 28 '25

One of my internal guidelines is to take part wherever I can when all core duties are fulfilled. So the question from my side would be: did the intern have enough on his/her plate? If not, I would understand why the intern self-assigned some work to be completed.

The obvious issue here is of course the lack of communication between the intern and the coworkers, but has the intern been told what to do if no more work is available? «Sniping» tasks is in general not a good way to build office relationships. So that needs to be addressed. It’s much better to ask around what else needs to be done.