George Cheeks Shares Lessons on Leadership, Growth, and Black Representation in Media | 2024 Summit

All right, well I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. My parents met at Kent State. My father's black, my mom's white, and they left Kent State and realized very quickly that being an interracial couple in the 1960s, where it was illegal in many states, was going to pose more challenges than they thought. So they spent a lot of time thinking about where to settle and in a community where we could feel accepted. So we ended up living in a small community in Cleveland, Ohio, which was kind of ahead of itself because it was about 50% black, 50% white, mostly white Jewish, and there were about four or five other interracial families nearby. So it really was sort of that Shaker Heights – it was near Shaker Heights, it's Cleveland Heights – very close. But it was just a great way for us to evolve and learn about ourselves, learn about our culture, and so it was a great foundation. And then the second part of your question leads me to probably one of the most important way markers in my life: Maynard Jackson, the first mayor of Atlanta, was my dad's best friend growing up. He was an uncle to me and a resource to me. And one of the first things he said to me when I was about 13 or 14 years old was, 'You know, you can't be aimless. You need to think about what you're passionate about and you need to start mapping out what your plan is for your career.' So my first answer was, I love TV, I love movies. And he said, 'All right, so from the first job you take at 15 years old, it's got to be about that business.' So my very first job was as an usher in a movie theater. So I'll never forget that grounding message of just making sure that everything you do in your life is intentional to what you're trying to achieve.

Well, first of all, I had no intention of ever being a lawyer. But I did practice law. I practiced law for a huge chunk of my career. When I, after second year of law school, I just wanted to send a message to my folks that I didn't want to be a lawyer, so I took a year off – which people don't normally do between second and third year of law school – and I worked as a casting associate in LA, thinking that would send a message. So then when I graduated from law school, I said to my dad, 'You know, I'm not going to practice law.' And he said, 'No, hell you're not. You're going to practice law.' It was one of the few times my dad actually was straight about what he expected of me. So the compromise was I went into entertainment law, so I became an entertainment transactional lawyer. That was my first job out of law school.

Well, it's in true form of the theme here, which was that it's all about growth. I literally started as a lawyer. I was a lawyer for a long time, but the entire time I was a lawyer, I kept doing everything I could to build my skills on the creative side. For example, when I was a lawyer at Viacom Media Networks, I would befriend the lead creative executives. I would ask them to let me do notes on scripts, I would ask them to let me do notes on reality cuts. So I just kept focusing on that. But I went from being a lawyer, I moved over to NBC in 2012 and was a COO and operational role. But I still didn't see how I was going to make the transition to somebody who's really managing a creative enterprise. And this is where, like, you know, the combination of working really hard and finding the right moments, but also getting lucky, happened to me. Because two years into my experience at NBC, I started working closely with Lorne Michaels, who runs Saturday Night Live, and he saw a skill in me that nobody else saw. So he started giving me creative responsibilities, and then a year into that, he told the CEO then of Comcast that George should be the head of late night. And that just changed my life, because that was the first time I actually had creative and business responsibilities.

Look, I think a lot of that has to do with the foundational support you get. Because going back to Uncle Maynard, he kept saying to me over and over again, 'You are going to, for your entire life, have to work twice as hard to get half as much, and you're never going to fail forward. It's never going to happen to you. You're going to see people around you who are going to fail forward, but that's never going to happen to you.' I think that was instilled in me from a very young age. I'll never forget when I got into college, my college counselor came to me and said, 'I don't know how you got into that school, but congratulations.' So there was always this sense of, I got to prove him wrong. So that drove me a lot. So the foundation of having somebody believe in me and tell me this is what you need to do, and then just constantly wanting to prove myself.

So I think the first time I actually saw it manifesting itself was when I took my first job as a summer associate out of law school. I remember they sent out a booklet of all the folks who were going to be in that summer associate program, and there were probably 35 or 40 of us. And every single person of color went to one of three schools: Harvard, Yale, Stanford – maybe there was one Columbia. Harvard, Yale, Stanford. There were other people – white people – who went to schools I've never even heard of. So I guess the message to me was again what Maynard said: you got to be twice as good. So I think that was the first time I actually saw it in practice. For me, the other tricky part too in terms of claiming my space: I'm a biracial man. People can walk in a room and not know who I am or what I am. So what drives me on that level is that I am proud of who I am. I am my father's son, I will always be my father's son. I've definitely been in situations where I've been in spaces where people didn't know what I was and they said some ignorant things. And I felt like, you know what, I literally backed my mind and was like, you are your father's son. So every single time, respectfully of course, I would say this is who I am and this is why what you just said is messed up.

That's all good, all good.

Yeah, I mean, I think it evolves based on where my career is. There's definitely people like Debra Lee, people like Nina Shaw – people that I really trust because it's also a question of safe space and trust, just knowing these are folks that you can really be honest and candid with. I think for me, because of the role that my uncle and my father played in my life in terms of helping to guide me, I always revert back to that. But in situational moments where there's something specific that I'm trying to figure out how to navigate, it depends on the situation. My recommendation to everybody is that there's no one way maker, there's no one mentor in your life. You should be as open as possible to many, because you'll have so many different moments in your life that you need to meet that moment, and there may be someone specific that you haven't really spoken much to before who can really help you navigate that moment.

Um, I guess I would say the second piece of – there are two pieces of advice that stick with me so deeply from Maynard. One was the one I already shared. The other one was: don't ever take any of this stuff for granted, and your legacy, your responsibility, is to make a difference. So if you are lucky enough to get a position of power or authority, if you squander it, it's meaningless. That message, particularly now as my career has evolved, is one that I take seriously and I take with me.

I definitely do. And I think the thing that has been the most humbling for me is working with people like Queen Latifah, like Cedric, like Tashiana, who have just been so incredibly supportive of me. And they're there for me in the moment when the challenges, which are many as we'll probably talk about later at the company, to just know they got my back is a very powerful feeling.

I think I'm always competing with myself because I'm always driving for excellence. I always want to meet the moment in every way – I want to meet the moment in how I'm driving the business, I want to meet the moment in how I'm driving cultural changes at the company. I think I'm never satisfied with anything, and I think that for me has worked in the sense that it propels me to just want to be better at what I do.

I wish I could say it's inherent, but I don't think so. I think it's because I definitely had moments – again, having a mentor as a young person, he'd call me out. I definitely had moments where I got distracted, I wasn't focused, I was focusing on the wrong things. I've definitely had sideways moments. So I don't know that I would have had those moments if it was inherent. When my parents split up and I was acting out, trying to figure my life out, I think I've made mistakes. So for me, it's really more about learned than inherent.

I think it goes back to what we were saying before. I think that there's not as much room to fail in the sense that you'll see many folks in the world fail forward – that doesn't happen to us. So the message always has to be: we're all going to get distracted, stuff's going to come up, but it's critically important that whatever it is we want to do, we stay on message, we stay as focused as we possibly can, because there are so many barriers to succeed in this world.

Look, I think it's really about just staying true to what your objective is and not letting that noise get in your way. Because there have been plenty of times in all of our lives when people have underestimated what we're capable of. So to me, it goes back to this idea of what propels me and makes me more competitive: when people think I can't do whatever it is I set out to do. I love what you said. It's powerful to be the first, but when you're the first, you need to make a difference. So I walked into CBS in 2020, and it was a very white organization. It was an organization that at most was reactive when it came to issues around programming and talent. I immediately said this has got to change. So laying out in the first weeks that I was there the framework for what my expectations were, because I wanted to be able to demonstrate this is why it matters that there's representation in leadership, because there's accountability and responsibility built in.

Yeah, I mean, it goes back to what you're saying before: getting an opportunity like this, a first-of-its-kind opportunity for me, and then walking into not only COVID and having to zoom in, but companies had merged – my company, CBS, felt like what do we do merging with Viacom? There was a lot of tension and friction. So I won't lie: the day before I started, I woke up with a full-blown panic attack. I was like, I don't know how I'm going to do this. But I just said, again, the messages in the back of my head: you just got to figure it out, you got to lean in. So day one, I sent an email out to the entire organization: 'We're all stuck at home, so I'm here, I'm ready – anybody who wants to talk to me and tell me what's going on, what's good, what's bad, reach out.' There was a little hesitation initially, and then by the fourth or fifth day, I was doing 20 or 30 zooms a day, and it included people who were more junior who I don't necessarily think would have walked up to the CEO's office and shared the stuff they were willing to share. I think it actually made me a better leader because I was able to really understand what was broken and what wasn't working, and be able to step into it.