The article gets off to a bad start:

As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their organization?

An employee and their employer have conflicting objectives. The employee wants to maximise their benefit, including advancing their career and life while minimising their cost, including expenditure of time and energy. On the other hand, employer wants to maximise their benefit, including maximising the value they extract from the employee while minimising their cost, including wages and other compensation. To suggest that the two parties to a performance review are substantially asking themselves the same question is incorrect and misleading.

There are, of course, opportunities for mutual benefit. Interests and objectives of employees and employers are not entirely antagonistic and it is not necessarily a zero sum game. But interests are very much different and in many respects antagonistic.

An employer would like to reduce wages and have employees work longer hours. An employee would like to have more income so that they can afford food, housing, raise their children and have some security when they are unable to work including health insurance and pension, and at least occasionally get home to see and maybe even enjoy some time with their family, friends and belongings. An employer might provide a mobile phone for the benefit of the employee being effectively on-call and monitored 24/7 with no more cost than the phone and service themselves and the cost of accounting to recover any expenses related to personal use. By providing a mixed-use device, the employer has the benefit that it is on even when the employee is not compensated for being on-call, providing uncompensated on-call benefits to the employer. The employee would rather not be bothered during their personal time, at least without compensation. Training? There is some mutual benefit but the employee wants training that maximises their career development, including immediate and future employment opportunities, while the employer wants to minimise expenditure and minimise the risk that the employee will use their new skills to find better (for them) employment elsewhere, while developing enough skill to meet immediate needs. In some cases, the antagonism is explicit: the employee will be required to compensate the employer if they leave their position before some stipulated period. Non-compete ‘agreements’ are another way employers attempt to minimise the benefit of training to employees. There are myriad examples where the interests of employee and employer are significantly adversarial.

An employee and employer should negotiate in good faith, with the mutual understanding that they have some mutual interests but their interests are not completely aligned, and to recognise and resolve the conflicts as much as possible while maximising mutual benefit. This is not achieved by Kumbaya illusions of each having the same questions and interests.