The police service used to have a rule; Sergeants have to spend at least 80% of their time working the regular beats with street-officers. As you go up the ran

The police service used to have a rule; Sergeants have to spend at least 80% of their time working the regular beats with street-officers. As you go up the ranks you spend more time at a desk, disconnected from reality, but even when you reach the rank of Captain, you still must spend 10% of your time out in a patrol car or walking the neighbourhood. This stops the kind of disconnected management that you speak of, where they think they are "above" the work and will justify this with all sorts of "management talk" about abstraction, metrics and overview to justify the fact that they've simply forgotten how things actually work and lost the edge. One trick that occasionally works is to drag them back down to reality by their ego. Ask for help. "I'm having a little difficulty understanding problem X, and *as my superior* I wondered if you could explain to me...." However, in general you cannot up-manage and educate people who refuse to engage. They lack the humility. They went into management as a refuge from the demands of understanding and you're reminding them of that.