Your work speaks for you.
I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.
I am a firm believer that you need a well-defined leadership role to deal with unexpected and non-linear side effects of people working together. You need someone to keep the threads untangled and forming a high-functioning web rather than a big snarl of a Gordian knot.
A toxic person kills, and by kills I mean totally destroys teamwork.
Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.
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.