I went from engineer, to engineering manager, to engineering director and had a similar conversation with my boss who is an Exec VP.
It's not clear whether he's responding to how you talk to your team or how you talk to him, or both.
If the latter there a few things to consider. You need to come to your boss with several possible solutions to your problems when you bring your problems to him. Let him advise you and give you ideas you haven't thought of, but he's not going to want to just solve all your problems. He has plenty problems of his own. He hired you to make decisions at a lower level.
You should bounce your instincts off of him and let him course correct you. Tell him how you're approaching solving the underlying causes of problems, not just addressing symptoms.
Be careful what your bring to him and how you talk about your problems. When you say 'fire' to an exec, they think you mean a forest fire, not a camp fire and they'll act with a heavy hand and get upset with you if they end up over reacting. The exec's wagons include artillery and nukes, not small arms. My mentor used to say 'Executive exposure can be good... But you can die from exposure'.
Talk about engineering risk, milestones, long term plans, etc. He wants to know you've considered the risks and have mitigation strategies. He wants to know that you know what things will cost. He wants to know what your effort estimates are. He wants to know that you've done due diligence in procurements and hiring to prove you need what you say you need.
He doesn't want to know who is doing what or what isn't working well, unless you need him to solve the problem with a nuke. If something isn't working, come up with new ideas.
If he's referring to how you address your team, you need to not help people solve their immediate problem by only talking with them about how to address the problem at hand.
You need to talk to them about expectations, habits, and behaviors. You need to have accountability conversations.
I had a training course from the folks that wrote 'Crucial Accountability' in how to have these conversations. It is incredibly effective. I highly recommend this approach.
You need to assess operational execution and develop procedures to improve it rather than just fighting fires. You need to help them be better, correct, rebuild, stay out of trouble in the future.
For operational leadership the book 'The Phoenix Project' really helped me develop a strategy.
A great book for personnel leadership that I used is 'First break all the rules'. It will help you cultivate talent in employees.
Develop a leadership philosophy of your own that you believe in and use it in your conversations with your teams. A great resource is the book 'One Piece of Paper'.
I hope these help.