Your team's job is execution, Executives job is prioritisation. Your job as a first level manager is to make sure your teams work is prioritised correctly and that your people visible and valued.
When you're talking to your manager, think about what details he would be interested in and give him ONLY what he wants. In some cases it is about omitting details, and in other cases it's about processing the details into more digestible metrics.
As an example, if your team is spending time on a recurring issue and you want to get executive blessing for a project to develop an automation tool, you would open the dialog by hard-selling the problem. You are loosing a huge amount of productive time, atleast 'x' man-days every week. Your engineers are frustrated by this. Every team in your company is impacted by this, not just yours... and guess what, MY TEAM can solve this.