But if the folks On High do not realize what the people doing the actual work value about their current position, that seems like a pretty big failure of leadership. If you don't understand the needs of those following you, you're not doing a good job leading.
Occam’s razor would suggest that it’s more likely that you have a pretty self-centred view of what “real work” is.
> Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year
> More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.
https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-...
Managing competing priorities and setting company-wide direction are certainly actual work - but regardless, that's pretty tangential to my real point about leadership.