apply-upward-influence

apply-upward-influence is a skill for Claude Code from jeffreytse/grimoire-core. It costs 41 tokens per session (2,161 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A management practice for working effectively with your own manager and influencing priorities without direct authority.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to align priorities, understand organizational pressures, and make a stronger case for team needs.
Why use it?
It helps managers secure decisions and resources for their teams instead of waiting for direction or escalating reactively.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the grimoire-business plugin — 145 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to align priorities, understand organizational pressures, and make a stronger case for team needs.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jeffreytse/grimoire-core --skill apply-upward-influence
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffreytse/grimoire-core

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install grimoire-business, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 145 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for apply-upward-influence

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for apply-upward-influence

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-upward-influence.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,161 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00041 $0.02161
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01081
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00432
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00216

Measured 6d ago against content hash d364a38adc89, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apply-upward-influence scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/business/leadership/skills/apply-upward-influence/SKILL.md · 145 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apply Upward Influence

Build an effective working relationship with your own manager, align proactively on priorities, and influence decisions and resources through understanding your manager's goals and pressures — rather than waiting for direction or escalating needs reactively.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Gabarro & Kotter's "Managing Your Boss" (HBR, 1980) is one of the most-reprinted articles in Harvard Business Review history and is taught in MBA programs at HBS, Wharton, and Stanford GSB as foundational management practice; Hill & Lineback's "Being the Boss" (2011) is Harvard Business Review Press's top-selling leadership book for new managers; McKinsey's leadership development programs explicitly include upward relationship management as a skill domain; the US Army's leader development doctrine includes "mission command" — operating effectively within the intent of the next level up — as a foundational leadership competency Impact: McKinsey's research on leadership effectiveness (2015, 189 leaders) found that the most effective leaders spent 25–40% of their relationship investment managing upward and laterally — not only downward; DDI's Global Leadership Forecast (2018, 25,000 leaders) found that leaders who proactively managed their relationship with their own manager had 30% higher team engagement scores and were 2× more likely to receive high-quality support for their team's resource needs; Gabarro & Kotter's original research found that managers who failed to manage the boss relationship systematically had their team's performance constrained by resource starvation, blocked decisions, and misaligned priorities Why best: The default management posture is to focus entirely downward — on the team — and treat the relationship with one's own manager as largely passive (wait for direction, respond to requests, escalate only when blocked); this posture systematically disadvantages the team because resource allocation, priority setting, and career advancement decisions all flow through the manager's manager; proactive upward relationship management converts this process from a lottery into a managed system

Read the full file on GitHub · 145 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 145 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A d364a38adc89

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apply-upward-influence is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffreytse/grimoire-core (4 stars, last pushed 21d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,161 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.