Grow Your People to Grow Your Business
Profit within change and disruption.
Grow Your People to Grow Your Business
Profit within change and disruption.
Our Story
The work captured by Humanyen began with Nicholas Rose, Ph.D., in 1952. His path into organizational psychology started in a place he could never have planned.
Nick was an honors undergraduate psychology major when World War II interrupted his studies.
He enlisted and was assigned to Santa Ana Army Air Base in Orange County, California, where he found himself working with a high-level team of social psychologists supporting the U.S. wartime effort.
Their challenge was intensely practical: identify the different human capabilities required for each of the ten specialized positions aboard U.S. warplanes, then develop ways to determine who was best suited for each role.
The work became an early form of what we now recognize as position-specific assessment for executive selection — matching people to roles based on the capabilities the work actually required.
For Nick, the war became an unexpected laboratory in applied psychology.
When the war ended, he carried the question with him: if rigorous assessment of people and roles could make such a difference under wartime conditions, what could the same thinking do inside organizations?
He went on to earn his Ph.D. and, in 1952, built a consulting practice around bringing those principles into organizational life — assessing talent, developing leaders, strengthening teams, and understanding how people affect performance long before those ideas became mainstream business practice.
Nick never stopped being curious about how things worked. Away from organizations, that curiosity showed up in building model airplanes, inventions he was forever tinkering with, and a dune buggy he loved to drive.
Then came the second generation.
After completing her Ph.D., Angela had been recruited by a leading psychology practice in Pasadena as its sole child psychologist.
She was thriving as a child psychologist when her father casually suggested she might be good at his world of organizational psychology.
Her response was immediate: “Dad, look at me, I am a young, small, 100-pound woman. Who is going to take me seriously advising executives?”
“The world’s changing, honey. Don’t sell yourself short.”
Those words changed the trajectory of her career.
Her father’s world was not part of the plan.
Then Nick asked Angela to shadow him through several all-day leadership assessments.
Sitting beside him during an executive interview, something clicked. Psychology suddenly operated at an entirely different scale: individual behavior connected to teams, teams to systems, systems to performance, and performance to measurable business outcomes.
Angela was hooked.
Like father, like daughter.
In 2000 Nick passed away, Angela took the helm, carrying forward five decades of her father’s work and adding three decades of her own.
Her path expanded the Humanyen's work through published research, international experience, years leading teams through change, nine years teaching communication to UCLA medical students, and six years presenting brain health and cognitive performance programs through the UCLA Longevity Center.
Ironically, the career Angela thought she was leaving behind became one of her greatest advantages.
Coming our of her first specialization, child psychology taught her to look beyond the presenting problem and examine the system around it. A parent can bring in a psychologist to help a child while unknowingly contributing to the problem. A CEO can bring in a consultant to fix a team while being part of the system that needs to change.
That work required revealing the truth without losing the trust of the people needed to change it. And it's the same work that has to happen inside business.
What passed from one generation to the next was more than a consulting practice. It was a curiosity about how humans and systems work, an insistence on looking beneath the obvious explanation, and a belief that understanding people can change the performance of an entire organization.
Angela caught the same curiosity bug her dad had...
When Angela isn’t working, she can usually be found figuring out how to fix something around the house, cooking Greek food, and counting the days to summer.
