At Lululemon’s global headquarters in Vancouver, Tanis Angove, MA‘15 helps guide major organizational shifts — designing change strategies, aligning leadership across functions, and analyzing how teams work and grow. As a change management analyst at one of the world’s leading athletic apparel brands, she operates at the intersection of people, performance, and purpose.
Now, she’s bringing that experience full circle back to Adler University.
More than a decade after enrolling at Adler University, Angove is now in front of the classroom. Drawing from a dynamic career that has spanned health care, nonprofits, utilities, and global retail, she is now teaching in program where her own professional journey began. Her goal? To prepare today’s industrial and organizational psychology graduate students for the realities — and possibilities — of the workplace.
Angove first came to Adler in 2013, drawn by the opportunity to merge her two passions: psychology and business. With a background in psychology and deep roots in her family’s business, she saw IO psychology as a way to improve how people work individually and systemically.
As a student, Angove engaged deeply with the Vancouver nonprofit landscape. She volunteered at Vantage Point, helped connect consultants with organizations through the BC Organizational Development Network, and completed a powerful Social Justice Practicum in Masaka, Uganda, an experience that continues to shape her perspective today.
After graduating in 2015, Angove applied her Adler training in diverse professional settings —first supporting physicians and specialists across Fraser Health Authority then transitioning into consulting roles with organizations like BC Hydro. In each role, she focused on building healthier workplaces through employee engagement, leadership development, and systems-level change.
That trajectory ultimately led her to Lululemon, where she now works as a change management analyst, guiding cross-functional teams through large-scale transformation. She designs long-term strategies, evaluates leadership alignment, and measures the impact of new ways of working.
“I’m helping shape the ways teams at Lululemon work and the tools they use to achieve their goals,” Angove said.
And in Fall 2024, Angove returned to Adler University as an adjunct professor.
“The school just can’t get rid of me,” Angove said, laughing. “My time at Adler was formative, and now I want to give back by helping today’s students build their careers.”
This coming fall, she’s looking at opportunities to teach other courses that utilize her experiences in change management, leadership, and communications.
“I want my students to be prepared, even more prepared than I was when I graduated,” Angove said. “I want them to achieve even higher successes.”
FOUNDATIONAL learning
Before arriving at Adler, Angove stood at a crossroads. With a psychology degree in hand, she considered pursuing counseling — but her roots pulled her in another direction. Raised in a family-run grocery business, she’d spent years immersed in the challenges of hiring, team dynamics, and managing people.
“I grew up watching my mom run multiple stores,” she said. “I saw how the psychology of work played out every day — how people thrived, how they struggled, and how leadership made a difference.”
Industrial and organizational psychology offered a way to merge those two worlds.
At Adler, she found a program that emphasized both purpose and practicality. She thrived in collaborative projects — designing workshops, mapping out learning experiences, and finding new ways to help employees feel seen and supported.
“Those practical courses continue to inform my work today,” she said. “It wasn’t just theory — it was application.”
Her Social Justice Practicum took her to Masaka, Uganda, where she worked alongside grassroots community leaders. The experience, she said, reshaped how she saw her role as a practitioner.
“It helped me recognize the biases I bring into my work and showed me how context matters in every setting,” she said. “That learning still shows up in how I lead today.”
HELPING THE NEXT GENERATION succeed
To Angove, becoming an adjunct faculty at Adler doesn’t really feel like a return.
“I technically never left,” she said.
Angove worked briefly as a teaching assistant while completing her thesis, and over recent years, served as a thesis supervisor.
“That role helped me stay up to date on what was happening in research while I was working in the ‘real-world,’” she said.
Combining theory and practicality has been an important approach for Angove in her courses.
“Some things can seem very clear in the classroom, but then in real life, they can show up differently,” she said.
To better connect the classroom to the real-world, Angove said she shares with her students colorful commentary from her past and current work, brings in guest speakers, many of them leaders and employees at Vancouver-area businesses and organizations, and helps students build their own networks. Last year, she invited two IO students to Lululemon to conduct their required professional practicum.
“I got to coach, encourage, and mentor them,” Angove said. “They thrived and did great work in the organization. I hope they feel more confident, gained more insight into applying IO psychology in the real world, and use that experience to move their careers forward.”
