managing-yourself

managing-yourself is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from manager-dot-dev/manager-skills. It costs 125 tokens per session (3,283 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for engineering managers who want to assess and improve how they work. It covers recurring tensions, difficult days, personal development, and possible blind spots in their behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for an effectiveness check, personal-development planning, handling recurring management tensions, and deciding how to respond on bad days.
Why use it?
It helps a manager make sense of feeling stuck or uncertain about their effectiveness. It turns that reflection into a likely diagnosis, a practical next step, and wording for difficult situations.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills/managing-yourself
Any agent
npx skills add manager-dot-dev/manager-skills --skill managing-yourself
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 managing-yourself

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills/managing-yourself.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills/managing-yourself)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills/managing-yourself"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/manager-dot-dev/manager-skills/managing-yourself.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,283 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00125 $0.03283
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01641
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00657
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00328

Measured 4d ago against content hash 5267cc088a6e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

managing-yourself 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 4d 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/managing-yourself/SKILL.md · 242 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 242 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Managing Yourself

Before Starting

Check for EM context first. If .agents/em-context.md exists, read it.

If .agents/em-context.md does not exist, ask for a minimal manager profile first and save it before giving detailed advice: role/title, team size, team mission or ownership area, and current challenge or priority.

If a specific person is central to the conversation and .agents/reports/[name].md does not exist, ask for a minimal profile for that person first and save it before giving detailed advice: title/level, tenure, strengths, and current challenge or growth area.

If the conversation reveals durable new context later, update .agents/em-context.md or .agents/reports/[name].md automatically. Save stable facts and patterns, not guesses, transient frustration, or unresolved interpretations.

Response Style

Keep the first answer concise and useful. Do not dump the whole framework unless the user asks for depth.

Default to:

  • State the likely diagnosis or recommendation first
  • Ask at most 2-3 targeted questions only if the missing context changes the advice
  • Give the next concrete action and, when useful, exact wording the manager can use
  • Mention the relevant framework briefly, but do not explain every part of it
  • Offer a deeper version only after the direct answer

How to Use This Skill

Identify the situation first:

  • Feeling stuck or wondering if you're doing the EM job right → The 10 Ways EMs Get Stuck (start here)
  • Things keep going wrong and you feel like the victim → The Drama Triangle
  • Having lots of bad management days → Why Managers Have More Bad Days
  • Team seems unmotivated or output is low → Clear the Path
  • Made a mistake with someone and need to recover → Repair
  • The same problem keeps coming back no matter how you solve it → Problems vs. Polarities
  • Your strength as an EM is becoming a failure mode → read references/extended.md — The Dichotomies
  • Feeling disconnected from the big picture / product → read references/extended.md — Balcony Awareness
  • Facing unexpected criticism, VP grilling, or a major outage → read references/extended.md — Staying Calm: The BAA Framework
  • Auditing how your time is split across growth / connection / impact → read references/extended.md — The EM Grid
  • Maintaining coding skills or staying hands-on → read references/extended.md — The Maker/Manager Mode
  • Getting feedback on management decisions before acting → read references/extended.md — Code-Reviewing Your Own Decisions
  • Writing your own performance review → read references/extended.md — Your Manager Delta
  • Diagnosing low engagement or bad team culture → read references/extended.md — The Inversion Model
  • Auditing your own time allocation → read references/extended.md — The LNO Framework
  • Something went wrong and you're figuring out what you missed → read references/extended.md — Extreme Ownership
  • Team is scared or anxious during a hard period → read references/extended.md — The Leader Absorbs Fear
  • Anything about your manager, managing up, or senior leadership → use managing-up skill

Read the full file on GitHub · 242 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 4d ago First seen · 242 lines · 125 tokens per session scan A 5267cc088a6e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

managing-yourself is a skill published in the GitHub repository manager-dot-dev/manager-skills (110 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 3,283 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.