How to motivate someone

TL;DR

You can't force motivation into another person, so the job is to change what surrounds them. Stop treating low motivation as their personal flaw, look first at the environment you have set up, get genuinely curious about what is going on for them, and make sure their work does not feel pointless. People put in real effort when they feel seen, when their work is left to mean something, and when someone actually notices what they did.

Insights

The first shift is to stop labeling someone as unmotivated, because that treats it as a fixed personal problem instead of something you can influence. Before pushing harder or offering incentives, look honestly at whether you have built an environment that actually inspires that person. Get curious and find out what is really going on for them, one on one. And if the environment is genuinely right and the role still is not a fit, the better move is to help them get somewhere they will thrive, not to label and pressure them into staying stuck.

The second lever is meaning. People work far harder when they can see their effort counts, and they give up quickly when it feels pointless. In one experiment, when people watched their finished work get taken apart or thrown away, they did much less of it even for the same pay, while people whose work was left intact and treated as real kept going and produced far more. So to motivate another person, make sure their work is not pointless: let them see the result, keep it, and treat what they did as mattering, instead of ignoring or undoing it.