Motivation is one of the principle tools of talent management. Team leaders try to motivate their reports in order to eke out the best of results from them. It also acts favourably to their commitment levels with the company. However, researches have proven that in more cases than not, employees’ motivation levels decline post their interaction with managers. This is because most managers usually do not have any approach towards this, but simply follow their gut instinct. Instead of following their instincts, managers must instead adopt a data-driven approach. Most motivational practices fail due to several reasons such as the goal-setting approach being too simplistic. Or performance evaluations could be biased. In some cases, if employees find the nature of the job as boring, no amount of coaching or mentorship is going to motivate them. Finally, most feedback rounds do not cause the intended impact as they do not focus on the positives but on fault-finding missions. HR practices need to imbibe more of data backed business analytics tools to foster greater levels of motivation.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/02/if-you-want-to-motivate-employees-stop-trusting-your-instincts