I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.
Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.
One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.
A toxic person kills, and by kills I mean totally destroys teamwork.
A milestone is less date and more definition.
If we're 15 minutes into a lifeless, redundant, status-based 1:1 and I don't have anything sitting in my back pocket, I'm going to turn it into a performance review.