Celeste Warren still remembers sitting on her bed in a dark room, her heart pounding, unable to sleep. Earlier that day, she had led a workshop that simply did not land. She had been new to the role, and she had set aside her own instincts in favor of colleagues with more credentials. When she stood in front of the room, the questions piled up, and none of the people who had shaped the material were there. The next morning she was physically and mentally depleted, running on autopilot, as she put it, “like a zombie.” Her workload had not changed overnight. What wore her down was the fear of failing and a voice in her head that had been there since childhood.
Celeste Warren is a TEDx speaker, an author, and the former Vice President and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at a global Fortune 100 company. She spent 28 years there, including a decade leading its Global Diversity and Inclusion Center of Excellence. Today, as founder of Celeste Warren Consulting, LLC, she helps organizations build fair and equitable systems and more inclusive leadership. Her perspective on burnout will feel familiar to anyone who comes home tired in a way sleep does not fix. Much of that exhaustion comes from the energy people spend protecting, managing, and hiding parts of themselves at work. Warren calls this state survival mode, and she says it is quietly draining talented people in organizations everywhere.
The Invisible Job of Surviving the Day
Celeste Warren describes survival mode as walking into every room feeling that “you have to protect your peace.” Sometimes that means pretending a comment has no effect on you. Sometimes it means watching people poke holes in your idea until it starts to feel like an attack. In those moments, she explains, people tend to fall into a few patterns. Some shut down and disengage until they no longer care. Others become defensive and spend their energy justifying their work. Some assimilate and start acting like the people around them, which Warren cautions against when the environment is toxic. And for some, surviving means leaving. As an HR leader, she has advised people to remove themselves from an environment once it starts affecting their emotional and physical health. She acknowledges this is not a decision anyone takes lightly, because people build real sweat equity in their organizations.
The exhaustion comes from the planning required by these patterns. Warren recalls a monthly meeting on a toxic team, two hours’ drive from her office, that left her stomach in knots every time. She spent days preparing for every possible scenario, spoke only when someone addressed her directly, and held every emotion in. Afterward, she often could not recall the meeting’s main outcomes, because all of her attention had gone towards just getting through it. “You have all of these micro strategies in your head for how you’re going to react going into just one meeting, let alone every single day,” she says. A useful exercise is to notice the strategies you run before a meeting: what you have decided not to say, and who you are bracing for. That list says more about the environment than about your ability.
Why Two People With the Same Workload Go Home Differently
Two employees can carry identical workloads, and one goes home fine while the other is wiped out. “It’s not the work, it’s the environment,” Warren says. She draws the contrast clearly. An employee whose leader has built a healthy environment thinks about tomorrow in practical terms: the meetings on the calendar and the deliverables due next week. An employee in a toxic environment spends the evening rehearsing how to dodge criticism, wondering what a colleague will say about them, and dreading the bully in the two o’clock meeting.
Notice what the second person never thinks about: the project itself. Warren points out that every one of those worries concerns surviving the day emotionally, which is the opposite of productive thinking.
She is equally clear that the cost spreads across the whole team. Leaders often assume their reliable performers can handle anything. Warren says those go-to people are often suffering in silence. They nod along in meetings, then work “two times and three times and four times as hard” behind the scenes to make a flawed idea succeed so they will not be blamed if it fails. One warning sign she points to is a team where people keep transferring out soon after they arrive. For leaders, the lesson is simple: steady output is not proof of a healthy team.
Fix the Environment, Not Just the Employee
When burnout shows up, many organizations respond by sending people to resilience training. Celeste Warren argues that this puts the entire burden on the individual. “Why don’t you fix the environment around the individual?” she asks. In her experience, organizations avoid this because “it’s harder to change the policies, the processes, the systems, the infrastructure.” It also takes time. And some people in positions of power like things the way they are, reasoning that they survived the system, so everyone else should be able to as well.
Warren believes that reasoning no longer holds. Many people entering today’s workforce will not tolerate a toxic culture, she says. They will “vote with their feet,” sometimes leaving before they have another job lined up. Turnover is expensive. Work goes undone while a position sits vacant. The remaining employees, already stretched, absorb the extra load. Then the organization pays to recruit, hire, and onboard someone new.
Fixing the system, Warren explains, starts with turning stated values into visible practice. If a company says it treats every employee with dignity and respect, it should translate that value into six or seven clear leadership standards. Everyone should know those standards, from a new hire to a 20-year veteran, and leaders should be evaluated and hired against them. When a leadership role opens, and the person chosen clearly demonstrates those standards, colleagues can see that the right person got the job. That, Warren says, is how values become part of the DNA of an organization. A practical starting point for any leader is to compare the company’s stated values with how people are actually hired, assessed, and promoted.
Psychological Safety Lives in the Silence
Celeste Warren has watched the same scene play out in meeting after meeting. A leader lays out a plan, asks whether anyone has questions, waits about fifteen seconds, and assumes everything is fine. Meanwhile, many people in the room privately believe the plan will not work. Warren teaches leaders to listen empathetically, which means paying attention to what people are not saying as well as what they do say. When the room goes quiet, she says a leader needs to start asking questions directly: What do you think? How can we make this better?
The goal is an environment where someone can play devil’s advocate in a positive, productive way and disagree with the leader without fear. Warren encourages leaders to follow up a dissenting view with genuine curiosity and phrases like “Tell me more.” Without that safety, she says, organizations cut off innovation and creativity.
She also emphasizes celebration, and admits it was once her own blind spot. Colleagues told her she was the most task-driven, people-oriented person they had ever met, and she rarely paused to recognize milestones along the way. Something as simple as bringing lunch into a staff meeting to mark progress on a long project helps build the trust that carries a team through hard times. Without that trust, she warns, a leader may charge up a hill and look back to find the team still standing at the bottom.
Trust Is Built by What People See
According to Celeste Warren, the foundation of trust is consistency. Leaders should do what they say they are going to do, whether the issue involves people, culture, or the business. Employees who have worked in a toxic environment may keep bracing for criticism long after a leader starts inviting their opinions, much like someone who keeps flinching after the threat is gone. Warren says the answer is to keep drawing people out in staff meetings and one-on-ones, and then to actually implement their ideas so they can see they were heard.
“They don’t trust what you say, they trust what they see you doing.”
~ Celeste Warren
Warren also recommends regular one-on-ones. They help a leader understand each person’s skills, strengths, life experiences, and the obstacles in their way. Removing those obstacles earns discretionary effort, because people feel seen and heard. When a direction has to change, she advises leaders to explain the reasons openly. Switching course without context is one of the fastest ways to lose trust that took months to build. During difficult stretches, she held a half-hour Monday check-in with no agenda, simply asking her team what was on their minds and listening. Many leaders claim an open-door policy while their doors stay closed and their calendars stay full. “You gotta be purposeful about it,” she says.
Warren believes leaders should begin with themselves. She recommends an honest self-assessment: Do I hold one-on-ones? Do people feel heard in my meetings? Do one or two voices dominate the conversation? Then she suggests asking team members, peers, and your own boss the same questions, and building a plan to improve on whatever they reveal.
Put Down What Was Never Yours to Carry
Survival mode has an individual side as well, and Celeste Warren speaks about it from experience. Growing up as a Black woman, she heard her parents repeat a protective message: “You gotta work twice as hard to get half as far.” She carried that message through school and into her career. She overprepared, checked everyone else’s work, and lived with relentless negative self-talk. To break the pattern, she had to tell herself repeatedly that she was good enough, that she belonged in the room, and that she had been chosen for a reason. A small circle of three to five people who offered honest feedback and encouragement helped her keep going.
Warren suggests three questions for anyone who feels drained by self-protection. The first is “What am I carrying that I don’t need to?” Once you know the answer, she says, stop carrying it. The second is “Where do I feel like I can exhale?” Remember the teams and leaders that made you feel that way, and try to recreate that feeling in new environments. The third is “What can you change, and what is not yours to fix?”, which she calls your sphere of control. For example, if a peer keeps getting talked over in meetings, you can calmly ask to hear the rest of what she was saying. If a problem sits outside your control, raise it with someone who can change it.
She also describes the cost of covering, which means hiding parts of your life at work. A colleague of hers, a devoted single father, invented work excuses so he could leave on time for his children’s soccer games. Warren had held a direct conversation with her own boss after returning from maternity leave, and she encouraged him to do the same. He did. Afterward, he told her, “That was the best conversation I’ve ever had in my career. Because now I feel like I can exhale.”
You Belong in the Room
The central lesson of Celeste Warren’s work is that exhaustion is not always a personal failing. Often it is a signal about the environment. When people stop spending energy hiding, bracing, and rehearsing how to survive a meeting, they have that energy back for the work itself, and for their creativity and confidence.
Leaders can start by listening to the silence, keeping their word, and ensuring their stated values show up in who they hire and promote. Individuals can start by asking what they carry that doesn’t belong to them.
For anyone running on empty, Warren’s message is direct: “You belong where you are.” She encourages people to walk into every room with their heads held high, confident in what they know and ready to contribute. After nearly three decades helping organizations build workplaces where people feel seen, heard, and valued, Celeste Warren knows how much changes when people no longer have to hide.
