managing-up

managing-up is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. It costs 31 tokens per session (1,059 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for working proactively with managers and company founders by sharing context, raising problems early, and aligning work with business goals. It includes communication routines and wording for difficult conversations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review communication habits, create regular updates, prepare disagreement or resource-request conversations, and plan how to earn more responsibility.
Why use it?
It helps reduce surprises, clarify priorities, request resources, and build trust while preserving the user's independence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to review communication habits, create regular updates, prepare disagreement or resource-request conversations, and plan how to earn more responsibility.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up
About the project

Lenny Skills is a collection of product-management and engineering workflows for Claude Code and other AI agents, covering areas such as strategy, research, planning, shipping, growth, and hiring. Each skill gives an agent specialized guidance, frameworks, checklists, or templates for product work, and the catalogue contains many of these skills.

RefoundAI/lenny-skills · 1,321 stars · on GitHub

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 RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill managing-up
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-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-up

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up/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 managing-up

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/refoundai/lenny-skills/managing-up.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,059 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 15 Feb 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00031 $0.01059
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00530
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00212
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00106

Measured 12d ago against content hash a390e13a3236, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

managing-up 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 12d 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-up/SKILL.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Managing Up for Leaders

Transform your relationship with leadership from a reporting line into a high-trust strategic partnership.

Help the user with managing up for leaders using insights from 21 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Audit current communication - Identify if the user is currently reactive or proactive in their updates and how they handle disagreement.
  2. Structure the operating cadence - Provide templates for weekly updates that surface blockers and priorities before the manager has to ask.
  3. Script difficult conversations - Draft specific language for pushing back on ideas or asking for resources using business-centered framing.
  4. Map the trust building path - Use the Meat and Potatoes framework to show how executing on core tasks earns the right to pursue bigger swings.

Core Principles

Reframe self-promotion as education

Deb Liu: "It looks like self-promotion. I wouldn't want to do that because it's self-promotion. But instead, what if I called it educating about all the great work your team has been doing? Helping people see why your team should get more resources, you have to actually share what you do."

Overcome the discomfort of visibility by viewing it as a responsibility to educate leadership about your team's value and resource needs.

Shift from pushback to business success

Jason Shah: "It starts from a place of I need to disagree, I need to say no. It's a very negative mindset, purely based on the word that has come to label a behavior that alternatively could be about how do I shift the direction on something, or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something, and that's a very different mindset."

Avoid the phrase 'push back' as it creates a sense of opposition. Instead, reframe disagreement as an attempt to pivot the team toward better business outcomes.

Prioritize dialogue over being right

Kenneth Berger: "Often what I try to introduce people to, and I've learned all this stuff the hard way, believe me, is it's fundamentally disrespectful to go into a meeting already deciding that you're right and the other person is wrong because you can't know that for sure."

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 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. 12d ago First seen · 73 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A a390e13a3236

Subscribe to this mod's changes

managing-up is a skill published in the GitHub repository RefoundAI/lenny-skills (1,321 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 1,059 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 2026-08-30.