The Cars in the Parking Lot
Celeste Warren on Legacy, Leadership, and Why DEI Is Just Business 101
There is a story that Celeste Warren carries with her everywhere she goes. She heard it in college, sitting at home with her father — a man with a master's degree in education who was hired for his first teaching job as a gym teacher. A gym teacher. Without a gymnasium.
So he held his classes in the parking lot.
And every period, every day, the parents of his students drove up and parked their cars to watch him. Not in support but in surveillance. Waiting for this Black man to do something wrong.
"I was getting enraged," Warren recalled. "I'm like, well, who do they think they are?"
She expected her father to tell her he confronted them, challenged them and sent them away. Instead, he said: I just did my job.
One by one, as days passed, the cars disappeared.
When her father died, the elementary school in that district was named after him.
That story is the DNA of everything Celeste Warren does. It's in the way she talks about leadership. It's in the way she defines legacy. It's in the way she refused, even as a vice president, even when the institution expected it, to become someone she wasn't.
Warren is a former Global Chief Diversity Officer at Merck, a published author, a sought-after voice in conversations about inclusive leadership, and one of Kulur Group’s 25 Dope Thinkers to Watch for 2026. She holds degrees from the University of Kentucky and Carnegie Mellon. She has appeared in Black Enterprise, Savoy, Diversity's Global Magazine, and enough stages in between to make her feel ubiquitous. But when you sit down with her, and I mean, really sit with her, what you get isn't the resume.
What you get is the daughter of a man who built trust in a parking lot.
"Legacy Is What Am I Doing to Uphold What They Believed In"
Warren lost both of her parents, but they live in everything she does.
Her father was the first Black teacher and first Black principal in Western Pennsylvania. Disciplined. Purposeful. A man who met hostility with integrity. Her mother was the COO of their household, "I would argue CEO," Warren laughed — a woman from Pittsburgh's North Side who looked quiet to strangers and burned like fire to everyone who actually knew her.
"Together, I have all of those parts in me," she said.
Legacy, for Warren, is not about monuments. It's about continuity, what gets transmitted through you into the people who come after you. Her children. Her team. The young professional who sat across from her in a mentoring session and didn't know whether to stay in a job that wasn't seeing them.
"I hope the same thing happens for those that I encounter," she said. "That they look at what I believe in and my purpose and say, that's something I want to carry through in my life as well."
Don't Assimilate. Accelerate.
One of the most powerful moments in our conversation wasn't planned. Warren was responding to a question about what she'd tell her 25-year-old self when she landed on a phrase that hit different, even for her.
Don't try to assimilate. Accelerate.
"When I first came into corporate America," she said, "I was told by so-called mentors, well, you need to assimilate. You need to act like they act. And I quickly learned that isn't how you accelerate."
She didn't arrive at this lesson easily. The early years of her career were spent listening to advice she shouldn't have taken, advice about how to dress, where to park her car, how to show up at senior levels. She tried it. She tried being someone else.
"It took me a short while to say: that's not you."
What Warren eventually understood, and what her father had already shown her in that parking lot, is that your authentic self is not a liability. It is an asset. And when you downplay it to fit spaces that weren't designed for you, you lose the very thing that got you there.
"As a woman of faith," she said, "God will put you in those places where you're supposed to be." Then she quoted the old gospel line: What God has for me, it is for me. And dared anyone in earshot to argue with that.
The Biggest Myth About Leadership
If you've spent any time in leadership development circles, you've probably heard variations of the same myth: that leaders are supposed to know everything. Have all the answers. Project certainty regardless of what's happening beneath the surface.
Celeste Warren would like that myth to retire.
"The higher you get up," she said, drawing the pyramid in the air, "the fewer roles there are. And when you're at the tip of that iceberg, you only know a certain amount. You're relying on your teams."
She broke it down with a basketball analogy she half-apologized for loving: the coach doesn't play all five positions. The guard, the forward, the center — each has a role. What the coach does is set the vision, make sure everyone has what they need to execute it, and blow out the obstacles in the way.
"You have to lead the team up the hill," she said. "Not know every inch of the terrain."
The leadership skill she most underestimated? Empathetic listening.
Not polite listening. Not strategic listening. Empathetic listening — the kind where you're genuinely trying to connect with what the other person is telling you, not just waiting for your turn to talk.
"You know those people that aren't really listening? They're thinking about what they're going to say next to counteract what you're saying," she said. "That's not listening. Empathetic listening is how you create a better strategy, connect better with customers, and connect better with the employees you're responsible for."
Equity, Fairness, and a Lesson About Funnel Cake
Ask Celeste Warren to explain the difference between equality and equity and she'll give you a clean, precise answer that's also somehow funny.
Equality, she said, gives everyone the same thing, regardless of where they started, what they've faced, or what they need to succeed. The problem: we didn't all start in the same place.
Equity meets people where they are. It acknowledges the barriers and obstacles that fall unequally across different groups of people and tries to remove them so everyone has a real shot — not a theoretical one.
And fairness?
"My father used to say: a fair is a place where you go and eat funnel cake and watch pigs."
Because what's fair to one person may not be fair to another. Fair is in the eye of the beholder. The phrase that actually moves the needle, she argued, is equitable and fair practices — together, not interchangeable.
It sounds like a semantic debate. It isn't. The difference between these three words determines whether your organization is actually creating conditions for people to succeed or just performing the appearance of trying.
DEI Is Under Attack. Here's Why That's a Feature, Not a Bug.
Since the 2024 election cycle accelerated anti-DEI rhetoric from political posturing into executive orders and corporate capitulation, the field Celeste Warren has spent decades building has been under sustained assault. The rollbacks. The rebrandings. The quiet removal of chief diversity officers and the loud celebration of "meritocracy" as if it had ever operated as advertised.
She's clear-eyed about what's actually happening.
"Fear," she said, simply. "Fear of those in power losing that power."
She laid out the case methodically. Globally, people of color are the majority, demographic shifts are already in motion and cannot be stopped by executive order. DEI, done correctly, requires changing systems, not just changing faces in seats. That's threatening to people whose power depends on systems staying exactly as they are. And underneath all of it is a bias so old it's barely examined: the belief that people who look different, love differently, or worship differently are somehow less capable.
"That is a basic flaw in thinking," she said. "And the foundation of it is just fear and ignorance."
But here's where Warren separates herself from the chorus: she doesn't frame DEI as charity or compliance. She frames it as business logic.
"If you're putting together a marketing strategy and you don't understand the diversity of your customers, that's marketing 101. How are you going to sell your product if you don't understand why certain segments of your market don't want it?"
Leadership 101. Management 101. Business 101.
She laughs when people talk about DEI like it's an imposition on how organizations work. Because the truth, as she sees it, is that it is how organizations work — or how they should.
Diversity Without Inclusion Is Just Differences in People
Warren offered one of the cleanest definitions of inclusive culture I've heard.
Diversity without inclusion, she said, is just an inventory — different people existing in proximity to each other, contributing nothing to a collective purpose, because they don't feel safe enough or valued enough to bring their full capacity to the work.
Inclusion is the culture that transforms that inventory into performance.
"If you want all of those people with all of those differences to get to your collective purpose," she said, "you have to surround them with a culture of inclusion, a culture of belonging, a culture of engagement — where they feel they can contribute regardless of who they are and how they identify."
Without it, you have the optics of diversity. You don't have the outcomes.
This is the distinction she flagged in the work of Shanger and Breyer — that representation alone doesn't dismantle existing power structures. It often just diversifies their surface. To actually redistribute power, you have to look at who gets access and why, who sits in informal influence structures (not just org charts), and whether your policies, practices, and procedures were built to include everyone from the very beginning of their design.
"You can't just change people without changing the system the people are in," she said. "Because if you don't change the systems, it doesn't matter what the people in power look like."
Celeste Warren is a former Global Chief Diversity Officer at Merck, executive consultant, and author. She was named one of the Dope Thinkers Only 25 to Watch for 2026. Follow her across platforms and connect at celestewarren.com.
