My Indian immigrant parents instilled in me an incredible and intense work ethic. I watched them put in long hours, with a relentless commitment to achieving their dreams. My father always said, “Keep your head down, work hard, and work some more, and you will be recognized.”

And yet, his advice to only work hard hasn’t always served me well at work.

Early in my career, I presented my company’s brand forecast at monthly senior leadership meetings. I spent hours and hours preparing and over-preparing, working into the early hours of the morning. The actual presentations were never more than 10 minutes long. On one occasion, overloaded on caffeine and sleep deprived, I completely blanked when the vice president asked me a question, and I stood there frozen in front of the senior leadership team.

I was working hard, but not on the right things. I struggled with being over prepared and striving for perfection. Without much coaching or guidance from my bosses, I wasted hours on details that didn’t matter, on pulling and analyzing the wrong data sets, and on answering the wrong questions.

Some might argue that these are simply mistakes we make in the course of our careers, and mistakes can help us learn and be better leaders. Yet research shows that contrary to what so many of us have been taught, the errors we make need to be close to the right answer in order to be educational. This is what helps us to learn and improve our memory to retain the correct information — and then ultimately do things differently.

But I never course-corrected the way in which I worked because I didn’t see my over-preparing and drive toward perfection as mistakes. And no boss ever coached me on how to work differently. Now as a leader who has helped coach and manage the careers of dozens of individuals, I recognize the important role I can play in preventing my teams from working relentlessly hard. Here’s how leaders can help their teams work smarter, not just harder.

Scope out the work for big initiatives.

“When I am helping a client sell their home, I have a number of individuals I am managing, while at the same time overseeing costs,” Adam Bickoff, broker associate at Compass, told me. “As the leader of the team, I have to scope out the project, assign tight deadlines, and manage not just the output, but focus on how the work is getting done. At the end of day, my job is to maximize value for my client. I can’t afford to have team members spending hours working hard on the wrong things.”

When Bickoff is scoping out the sale of a home, he starts with setting a timeline with his clients based on the date they want the house on the market. He then clearly outlines for his team all the key milestones they must complete, including housing inspection, repairs, deep cleaning, staging, and hosting open houses and showings. He assigns the approximate hours it will take to complete each milestone. “We are working with a number of clients on buying and selling homes at once, and so every hour counts, not just for us, but also for our clients. We have no choice but to work smart.”

Bickoff’s process for ensuring his team is working smart can be applied to industries outside of real estate. Leaders should help their team members up front by setting clear end dates for large initiatives, assigning approximate hours for key project milestones, and coaching them if they’re spending too much time on a specific task. When any one team member spends hours working on the wrong thing, it can have a ripple effect on the rest of the initiative and impact key deliverables. Finally, leaders must remember that there is a difference between providing helpful guidance and direction and actually doing the work for the team and micromanaging details.