[allochthon]

By self-promotion, I'm thinking of the following kinds of thing:

- I say something subtle or not-so-subtle that I perceive will impress other people concerning my (real) abilities, for the sake of impressing them.

- I intentionally say something that will make me look better than a peer.

Self-promotion is not so easy to define, but it's something you can recognize when you see it. This is behavior that in a previous time we would have thought of as immodest. Americans (I'm one) and others with similar cultural tendencies don't have a sense of how self-promotion comes across to people. Avoiding it is as much a matter of good taste as anything else.

is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?

It seems to me that a necessary qualification of a manager is that he or she take the time to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his or her reports at a level sufficient to have an opinion about their contribution, one that is not dependent upon them needing to be flashy in various ways. My sense is that anyone who cannot do this is either too busy or perhaps otherwise not in a good position to supervise a team.