Collaboration implies underlying work. Something the collaborators are doing together in addition to talking. The vast majority of the talking in my corporate environment either has no such referent, or is a one-sided accounting of the work you are doing up to someone whose job it is to allocate your time or supervise that work, not to personally advance it with you.
A good litmus test is what someone's calendar looks like. People who are in wall to wall meetings every day (managers, Staff+ engineers, TPMs, etc) can never, properly speaking, collaborate, since there is no time where they could be doing the work being collaborated on. They have coordination and supervisory functions that may be valuable, even indispensable, but what they do is different from collaboration.
A good litmus test is what someone's calendar looks like. People who are in wall to wall meetings every day (managers, Staff+ engineers, TPMs, etc) can never, properly speaking, collaborate, since there is no time where they could be doing the work being collaborated on. They have coordination and supervisory functions that may be valuable, even indispensable, but what they do is different from collaboration.