At my first job, the only one-on-one I ever had with my manager was a yearly scheduled "performance review" (in Swedish, the word used is the same as that used in grade school), during which we assessed my competence.

When a higher level manager wanted to know why the product development wasn't as good as it could be, an external consultant came in to observe for a couple of weeks. He actually did talk one-on-one with each employee. He asked me what I thought really needed to be done, in a genuine way.

He produced some kind of report. We asked for several months to see the report, but it never surfaced. Then I left to join a small startup...