Great Manager Profile: Deborah Yano-Fong

Editor's Note: This is the third profile in an occasional series to highlight UCSF's great managers as determined by scores in the 2011 employee engagement survey administered by Gallup.

Understanding her staff’s needs and helping them achieve their goals is one of Deborah Yano-Fong’s greatest strengths as a manager.

Coming from a Japanese-American family, Yano-Fong says her parents put a lot of emphasis on education. They tried to steer her toward medicine, but Yano-Fong had wanted to be a nurse since elementary school. “Nursing is about the patient,” Yano-Fong says, and that compassionate focus on the wellbeing of another is the basis of Yano-Fong’s  management style.

The connection between her training as a nurse and her expertise as a manager does not end there. “Nurses help educate patients, and teach and mentor new nurses. These are all key skills for new managers, for supervising people.” In addition to these skills, Yano-Fong has added serving as a role model and a coach.

The daughter of Mary Yano and Yukio Yano — a research chemist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab whose work led to the development of the isotopes that are still used in PET scans today — Yano-Fong went to school in El Cerrito and from there to UC Berkley, her father and mother’s professional home. After beginning coursework in premed, Yano-Fong transferred to UCSF to complete a bachelor’s degree in nursing. Eventually, she completed her graduate degree in nursing at UCSF as well.

“Nursing has been wonderful for me,” says Yano-Fong. “It has provided me with the opportunity to do clinical nursing, to be a nurse manager, to go to graduate  school, to have a child, and, while parenting, creating a job share with another nurse, Susan Alves-Rankin, to serve as the first ever co-directors of Patient Relations.”

According to Yano-Fong, the concept of job sharing was new to UCSF. But as a result of its success, Yano-Fong and Alves-Rankin served as examples of how two nurses could balance their professional lives and family responsibilities. Yano-Fong served in this role, and several others at 50 percent time, until the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed and then Chancellor J. Michael Bishop and Mark Laret, chief executive officer of UCSF Medical Center, appointed her to the position of Chief Privacy Officer for UCSF. Since then, the Fishbon Medical Library and the Patient Health Library have come under her auspices as well.

Applying Lessons Learned in Nursing

Over the years, Yano-Fong has become a nationally recognized leader in the emerging field of patient privacy, one that involves a great deal of legal and policy analysis and high stakes decision-making. She has become a key advisor to other UC privacy officers and has been involved with the state of California’s privacy steering committee and CalOHII (California Office of Health Information Integrity) the oversight body for enforcement of state privacy laws.

In addition to becoming an expert in her field, Yano-Fong has continued to focus on management skills that she honed as a nurse: clear communication, high standards and strong organizational skills. These are the hallmarks of Yano-Fong’s ongoing success. She explains that she learned over the years the key to managing people is to do it on a person-by-person basis. “Know their strengths and weaknesses,” she says, “and also what their goals are for their professional career growth.”

Yano-Fong’s first experience managing people was as an assistant nurse manager role on 8 North South at UCSF Medical Center on the Parnassus campus.  Soon after, she became the nurse manager for the neurosurgery/neurology unit on 8 Long Hospital. “It was a lot,” she says, but she felt prepared. “Nursing requires a cohesive team. From shift to shift, hour to hour the priorities change based on the needs of the patients. The worst night is bearable with a strong team; collaboration and teamwork is how people survive getting through rough spots.”

Using key concepts from the health care and nursing profession, Yano-Fong has flourished as a manager. “My role,” she says, “is in helping an individual know where they want to go and helping them build the skills to get there.” But her value as a manager is not only in supporting the development of her staff, Yano-Fong also ensures that the key values and goals of the organization are incorporated into everyone’s job description. “Our organization has been very clear about mission and values,” says Yano-Fong. “It is very important that my managers know the goals for the year, where we are going, and what we are marching to.”

Providing Feedback and Recognition

How she does this is by setting clear, inspirational standards and providing regular feedback and recognition. When a team member handles a difficult situation well, Yano-Fong sends a note to the individual acknowledging their success. Also, if her team has gone through a difficult time or experience, Yano-Fong will take the group out to lunch — to celebrate together and to acknowledge their hard work. “Real time recognition is really important to me,” Yano-Fong says, “also recognition beyond the group.” To that end, she has started a monthly academy award for staff recognition.

During the last Employee Engagement Survey, Yano-Fong’s team scored highest in the area of feedback and recognition. Notes Yano-Fong, “you hear all the time that the people in an organization are the critical element. I really do believe that. I transmit this to everyone I work with. Being valued ensures teamwork and that we can be successful.” Providing feedback and recognition ensures her group is motivated, guided, and acknowledged for their accomplishments. 

Vicky Kirby Martin, PhD, associate privacy officer for UCSF, notes the impact of Yano-Fong’s management practices. “Deborah supports us in a way that ensures we can express opinions and think ahead. She allows the team to evolve: we participate, contribute and innovate.” This is critical. “Everyone wants innovation, but often we reward the one and ignore the rest,” Kirby Martin says. “Deborah creates trust so the whole group feels safe to contribute.”

Yano-Fong cites Leader as Coach, as a useful resource for managers interested in building their feedback and recognition skills and learning to coach their employees. For Yano-Fong, the key to being a successful manager coach is to “pick coachable moments.” It is not, she says, simply “telling someone what to do but helping them define their pathway.”

Yano-Fong acknowledges, it isn’t always easy. “Sometimes there are challenges, but I find the greatest benefit comes from focusing on my team’s success.”

To maintain this positive focus, Yano-Fong puts a high value on ensuring her team takes the time to break bread together and to gather around cultural events. Notes Yano-Fong, “diversity is a key value at UCSF and a key value for being a leader.”

Yano-Fong is a long standing member of UCSF’s Council of Minority Organizations (COMO) and served for many years as the co-chair of UCSF’s Asian Pacific American Systemwide Alliance (APASA). She has also participated in the MLK Commemoration Planning Committee, which plans UCSF’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration Celebration.

Building Relationships with People

“A key component of being a leader and manager is building and maintaining one-on-one relationships,” she says. “Having the background and expertise of working with different people — understanding there are cultural and personal differences — enables me to better support and work with others. Through this, I understand how to recognize individual preferences and support people to ensure they can do their best.”

For Victoria Kleemann, longtime director of Volunteer Services for UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Yano-Fong’s strength is in her ability to establish and communicate an underlying sense of respect. It is also Yano-Fong’s commitment to giving time and attention to each member of her team that makes everyone understand their importance to the mission. “It is a simple form of acknowledgement,” says Kleemann, “but it is the basic foundation for creating collaboration and a strong team.”

Susan Alves-Rankin, RN, MS, assistant director of Patient Services and Service Excellence, sums up Yano-Fong’s abilities like this: “Deborah has a high level of personal and professional integrity which is visible in everything she does. She has very high standards, serves as an excellent role model, and expects of others only what she herself would do. She is also infamous for always supplying grazing snacks and comfort foods to nourish her team’s spirit. What else could you ask for in a manager?”

David Odato, associate vice chancellor of Human Resources and chief administrative officer of the UCSF Medical Center and Yano-Fong’s manager, notes that cites Yano-Fong’s practice of recognizing staff as central to her success as a manager. “Just this week she told me about someone who had done something well.” As a result, Odato explains, he wrote a thank you note and the individual was so pleased, “she was grinning from ear to ear.”

Odato has seen the impact of Yano-Fong’s attention to her staff. “Her strengths are developing people, being an excellent listener, engaging her staff and helping them come up with their own solutions.” As a result, many of her staff members have been promoted through the ranks at the medical center.

Yano-Fong echoes this as a core value for her. When asked how her staff would describe her as a manager, Yano-Fong responds, “I think staff would say I am supportive both professionally and personally. I would hope that they say that I help to provide opportunities for them as well.”

Her hopes have come to fruition. Through her practice of setting inspirational expectations, providing feedback and recognition and coaching her team for development, Yano-Fong serves as an exceptional role model for other managers. She lays the foundation for those who work with her to be effective in their current roles and helps them hone their skills for professional growth and enduring success. 

Photo by Susan Merrell