You can't solve for decades of bad habit. Someone being lazy, lacking grit & determination is not something that's easy to solve for. To be motivated, an ind

You can't solve for decades of bad habit. Someone being lazy, lacking grit & determination is not something that's easy to solve for. To be motivated, an individual must have a sense of autonomy, ability to self organize and regulate, to set goals, plan, schedule, manage time, and be able to tie in their personal goals to the organizational goals. I've found out that at best all you can do is put a carrot in front of them and once they eat it, replace with another carrot. It's tiring, best of course is to hire a great person so you don't have to deal with this, but if this person is worth it, then it might be worth you mentoring them for a long time, giving them the right books to reads, building systems and processes that covers their weaknesses. This is something that I have put a lot of time into and I'm not sure can be addressed in a post or even a few pages. Nevertheless, you need to listen to their excuses, and then probe for the reasoning behind the excuse. It's either that they don't want to work or they don't know how to do the work. The later is easy, you train em. If they don't want to the work it can be for various reasons, it could be fear, it could not seeing any value in it, it could be boring. If it's fear, address it, environments such as blame free culture where people can experiment and failure is owned by the team helps address this. If it's not seeing value, then you have to show how the work is valuable to you, the team, the company, the world and to the associate. If it's boring, you have to teach and educate them that even the most exciting works are 80% grunt and mundane things and those things are just important. What are the excuses? If they are asking for promotion but not delivering, you must deny it. It should not come as a shock to them since you should be having 1on1s often and a good feedback loop to them. Best of luck.