I'm currently a high level IC, and this is what we talk about: 1) Pleasantries about our kids/family/how our last vacation was/etc. for a minute. 2) Any quest

I'm currently a high level IC, and this is what we talk about: 1) Pleasantries about our kids/family/how our last vacation was/etc. for a minute. 2) Any questions I have for her, which usually mean questions about corporate policies or procedures, or questions like, "I need to know about project X, who would be a good contact", or things like, "I need to accomplish Y, usually I would do it like this, but how is that done here". 3) Any context she has for me that she got at higher level management meetings that I need to know. 4) Occasionally status updates on projects she is every interested in or that her management is asking about so she can be ready to answer them. 5) Every fourth or so meeting (roughly monthly) we talk about career development, projects that might be good to get involved in with high visibility or impact, etc. When I was a manager managing more junior folks, they were something like this: 1) Talk about family/friends/etc. sometimes for 20+ minutes, however long they wanted to talk. Especially during COVID, I was sometimes the only person they talked to during the week. 2) Demo of their work since the last meeting -- UX demo or code review, whatever they want feedback on, if anything. Then I would give them product feedback or code feedback. 3) Context for their next task. They would either tell me what they want to do next or ask me and I would give them suggestions for next tasks and why each is important to the business and let them choose. 4) Anything else I can help with. For senior folks, we'd usually skip #2 unless they wanted specific feedback. The commonality was context. I operate better with more context, and so do people who work for me, so I see the main job as a manager is a conduit for context -- why are we doing the work we are doing.