And setting vague goals which may, or may not, have been achieved is better for the employee or the company?! But you're right to an extent, and I skipped over

And setting vague goals which may, or may not, have been achieved is better for the employee or the company?! But you're right to an extent, and I skipped over it. There's a class of things (call them skills, behaviours or competencies) which aren't suited for evaluation through measurement: "teamwork", "leadership" etc. These are not goals and it's important to understand the difference. For competencies it's best to evaluate them on a simple scale (say 1-10, we don't even label the exact score) so the discussion naturally becomes a bit fuzzy and less concrete — because the concepts are fuzzy. Let's be honest, you want employees to improve in these competencies but there's really no effective way to evaluate them. Plans and reviews should be driven by the measurable stuff (goals) and the employee's development is driven by discussions not scoring of their skills/competencies/whatever-you-want-to-call-them