Motivation is a key (well, also a keyword) to open the most terrific and surprising doors.
Motivation is more important than skills (don’t get me wrong: skills are important).
Motivation is what helps people to continue working even if all around us, the world collapse.
As a team leader, Motivation is nothing that you can give to people.
But you can inspect what motivates your team(s), to find out how to inspire them, and how you can help them maintaining their own motivation. Human being is really impressive when it goes to enthusiasm: it only depends upon the environment, and when this environment is properly setup, this motivation and enthusiasm can grow infinitely by itself. Anyway, building a strong environment aligned with a team is not « simple and always funny ».
Once we agree on that, here’s a little help to understand the motivation factor of a team, based on Dan Pink’s book and three main elements of motivation: purpose, autonomy, mastery.