How to Audit Your Friend Group: A Step-by-Step Guide
A friend group audit is not about ranking your friends. It is about honestly diagnosing what your squad is missing before the gap becomes a drift you cannot reverse. A friend group audit sounds clinical, and that is the point. Most of us evaluate our friendships the way we evaluate our diets: with a vague sense that things are probably fine and a refusal to look too closely. But friendships, like diets, have measurable inputs and outputs, and refusing to measure them does not protect you from the consequences. It just delays them. A squad audit is the practice of looking at your friend group honestly, on a regular schedule, so that you can fix small problems before they become the kind of problem that ends a group. Step 1: Map the Roles The first step of any audit is establishing what you are auditing against. In the case of a friend group, that means mapping the eight core roles onto your actual members. Take a piece of paper, list every member of your squad down the left side, and list the eight roles across the top. The eight roles are: Planner, Chaos Agent, Mom Friend, Hype Man, Ghost, Connector, Wildcard, and Anchor. For… Read more on the Squad Audit blog, meet the squad roles, or audit your own group.