The ritual is familiar in organisations around the world. How can you motivate employees, day in and day out, to ensure that they deliver their very best?

For years, human psyche demanded that the answer lay in the size of the pay cheque. More recently, blogs are full of alternative solutions. For example, this article from a human resources agency, ADP, refers to nine useful approaches.

• Challenge and train
• Make people feel appreciated
• Give employers autonomy
• Create winning teams
• Ensure they have similar goals to you
• Just talk to them
• Be flexible
• Give time off at key moments
• Be fair, and not just right

I am sure my readers can add to this list. And when you consider it, many of these things are incredibly obvious. As a business coach in Israel, I encourage my clients to adopt much of the above. But this subject raises one very difficult question.

If these concepts are so intuitive, why do many of us simply fail? We do not apply them. Is it that we are too lazy? Or that we are caught up in the day-to-day running of our companies or departments that we forget? Are we so scared that “bonuses” will reveal that the staff may actually know something we do not or possess a skill that we do not have?

What these questions highlight is that our approach to motivation often lacks the appropriate balance. We tend to start from a premise of “why are they not motivated?”.

Instead, I suggest that managers and leaders first ask themselves what they can do differently. How do they need to change their own approach in order to encourage and motivate their colleagues and employees further?