I'm freshly team leader of a small team of coworkers I'm working with for years. We are great team, and working well together. I got a new guy who got promotion in my team just because his previous managers (2 or 3, all of them left the company) promised him and company doesn't want to stop his promotion or delay it any more.

Guy is intelligent, he can do great job WHEN he want. On the other side, he is sloppy when working on tasks he doesn't want to. As we all work in company's interest, "not so interesting" task are normal, not everything is always perfect. Problem with his sloppiness is that he is so inattentive that this not only affect systems that he is working on, but also other systems/customers. Other coworkers (and not just from my team) also doesn't like to work with him.

I tried to give him tasks that would be interesting to him, no result. I also tried to talk to him to give him more space for professional growth (while this is in the interest of the company), to learn new technologies if he want to. He did nothing. He started to learn some new stuff to get certificates he want to, but he never did anything. He completely wasted that time. Not even tried to braindump the exam questions.

His work attitude reminds me of a lazy but intelligent kid everyone of us had in school. Teachers tried to get to him, and kid was aware of his own laziness, but no one ever succeed to encourage him. What to do, or better, how to get to him?