Just as Louis Leakey advocated for Jane Goodall and other women scientists, today’s leaders can create lasting impact through authentic sponsorship and inclusion.

Ronit Kark November 10, 2025 Reading Time: 6 min

Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Colin McPherson/Corbis Premium historical via Getty Images

**Summary: **

As Jane Goodall worked to become a world-renowned scientist, her sponsor, Louis Leakey, played an important role as an advocate and mentor. Leakey supported the work of other women scientists as well, by identifying overlooked talent, investing in people’s potential, trusting autonomy, pairing inclusion with purpose, and living his values inside and outside of work. At the current moment, these leadership principles are vital.

When Jane Goodall died in October, the world lost more than a scientist. It lost a moral compass: a woman whose quiet persistence taught humanity to see connection where it once saw hierarchy. Her decades of observing chimpanzees in Tanzania reframed our understanding of intelligence, empathy, and cooperation. Yet Goodall’s story is also one of leadership — of what happens when someone in power sees potential in those the system has overlooked.

Long before Goodall became a household name, British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey recognized her patience, intuition, and curiosity. Lacking formal credentials, Goodall was working as a secretary when the two met. Leakey used his credibility to sponsor her research on chimpanzees, secure funding, and legitimize her in a male-dominated field. He later supported Dian Fossey (studying mountain gorillas) and Biruté Galdikas (studying orangutans) as well. The three female scientists, collectively dubbed the “Trimates,” would each go on to transform the study of primates and reshape public understanding of life on Earth.

Leakey and Goodall’s relationship offers today’s executives something rare: a time-tested model of allyship and sponsorship that works. At a moment when many organizations are retreating from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, Leakey’s behavior illustrates how authentic sponsorship and inclusion can generate long-term effects.

Cultivating Talent: Five Lessons

Five enduring lessons drawn from contemporary management scholarship can help business leaders turn their convictions into allyship strategies that work.

1. Use Your Power to Open Doors

Leakey wielded his institutional reputation to advocate for women scientists, long excluded from field research. He publicly endorsed Goodall (and other women), leveraged relationships with funders, and attached his own name to his mentees’ work — lending credibility they otherwise would have been denied.

This exemplifies what researchers M.A. Warren and M.T. Warren have called virtue-based allyship — the deliberate use of moral courage, prudence, and compassion to act on one’s values, even when it carries risk.1 Modern leaders can mirror this behavior by sponsoring underrepresented employees for visible assignments, naming their contributions in executive forums, and taking personal responsibility for creating opportunity.

As David G. Smith and W. Brad Johnson argue in their book Good Guys, allyship from those with positional power is most effective when it redistributes opportunity, not just empathy.2

Leakey’s choice to stake his reputation on others’ promise captures this principle.

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About the Author

Ronit Kark is a full professor of leadership in the psychology department at Bar-Ilan University, a part-time distinguished research professor at the University of Exeter Business School, and an Anna Boyksen Fellow at the Technical University of Munich’s Institute for Advanced Study.

References

1. M.A. Warren and M.T. Warren, “The EThIC Model of Virtue-Based Allyship Development: A New Approach to Equity and Inclusion in Organizations,” Journal of Business Ethics 182, no. 3 (January 2023): 783-803, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-05002-z.

2. D.G. Smith and W.B. Johnson, “Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

3. M.A. Warren, “Amid DEI Rollbacks, Champion Allyship,” MIT Sloan Management Review, March 5, 2025, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

**4.**W. Zheng, J. Kim, R. Kark, et al., “What Makes an Inclusive Leader?” Harvard Business Review, Sept. 27, 2023, https://hbr.org.

5. M.A. Warren, T. Sekhon, and R.J. Waldrop, “Highlighting Strengths in Response to Discrimination: Developing and Testing an Allyship Positive Psychology Intervention,” International Journal of Wellbeing 12, no. 1 (2022): 21-41, https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v12i1.1751.

6. Q.M. Roberson, “How Integrating DEI Into Strategy Lifts Performance,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Nov. 7, 2024, https://sloanreview.mit.edu.

7. Warren and Warren, “The EThIC Model,” 783-803.

8. Roberson, “How Integrating DEI Into Strategy Lifts Performance”; and Smith and Johnson, “Good Guys.”

9. Smith and Johnson, “Good Guys.”

10. W. Zheng, J.Y. Kim, and R. Kark, “Every Rose Has Its Thorns: How Exemplars Manage the Tensions in Inclusive Leadership,” Journal of Business Ethics, April 30, 2025: 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-025-05993-z.

11. Zheng et al., “What Makes an Inclusive Leader?”

12. Smith and Johnson, “Good Guys.”