I have never thought it was a bad thing to share my early drafts with fellow faculty (although now maybe I will). My impression is that the positives almost always outweigh the benefits. Experienced colleagues have much to offer that could help frame the paper, prepare it for review, etc. Why try to learn the game all on your own?

Perhaps a reasonable mixed-strategy is to find a handful of senior colleagues who you trust to be honest and assess your work fairly. Rather than spreading your early drafts widely, you only seek advice from your colleagues that you trust to be fair to you.

Good points all, Lisa, and I think the "answer" in any particular case depends on (1) your institution's culture (i.e., is it a place likely to deem limitations of a junior scholar's work "fixable" or as reasons to critique the hire of him/her after the fact?) and (2) whom you ask (because surely there are profs who'd get very critical of an early draft but others who would be more constructive).

So maybe the answer is to wait until you've been at the institution long enough to know (1) whether the culture makes circulating drafts a good or bad idea and (2) whom to circulate drafts (and for that yuo can ask the first person or two you come to trust).

My own (perhaps optimistic) hunch is that after a few months you can get a half-decent sense of the institution and some of its people, so it'd (I hope) be the rare school at which a junior scholar should opt against circulating scholarship.

Thanks for the comments. I would agree with the notion that the optimal "strategy" would be to share your draft with as many people as possible because such sharing can only enhance your scholarly work, and it is unfortunate that these other concerns (real or imagined) take away from that sharing process.