I treat them as prompts. I’ll give my team as much fore notice as possible what the topic will be and ask them to really think about the question in advance. Otherwise the conversations are often shallow. My team often writes out their thoughts and we go through it, it’s been pretty successful I think!
That may be their perspective, true! But if so I would consider that a red flag indicating burn out. Why are they so worried about deliverables? Do they feel the timelines are too aggressive? Are they really so overloaded they can’t take 20 minutes to think about their work from a different perspective? What other problems do they care about? As a manager I need to tease out these things. But each team is unique; what works for my team might not work for yours!
In 4 years of doing 1:1s this way, at different companies and with dozens of teammates, I have received mostly positive feedback. And I’ve definitely adapted the process to address concerns. But again, every person has their own individual needs and preferences.
While I sympathize with your viewpoint, ultimately if your manager is trying hard to improve your life at work and you just find ways to convert that into a negative and a major source of stress, I can't help but interpret that as a huge red flag that needs to be examined in detail. Either you fundamentally have a bad attitude and are going to be unhappy and stressed no matter what even when your manager is going out of their way to help you, or there's something wrong with the way some projects are going, or deadlines are unreasonable, etc.
