About the Author

Author Info

Kitty Wooley founded the Senior Fellows and Friends conversational events network, now in Year 23, and is a district representative of the American Society for Public Administration. She spent 19 years at the U.S. Department of Education in San Francisco and Washington, DC after a decade in college administration. Positions at ED included institutional review specialist, risk specialist, and management and program analyst. She wrote a chapter ("Four New Models of Networked Leadership Development") in Innovations in Human Resource Management: Getting the Public’s Work Done in the 21st Century. She built bridges in every job across departments, generations, agencies, and sectors to get work done better - and you can too. She is the author of From Networking to Boundary Spanning: How you can get results inside large organizations (2026).

News
On May 28, 2026, Kitty will present and discuss the following with members of the ASPA Greater Chicago Chapter:

Boundary Spanning: A difference-making capability

Shifting your focus from networking to boundary spanning unlocks a lifetime of reward.

What's the difference?  Networking focuses primarily on connecting to benefit my career, whereas boundary spanning focuses on reaching across for a mission-related purpose while my network quietly grows in the background.  As we develop this niche capability, we increase our organization's collaborative capacity to solve hard crosscutting problems. In the meantime, our professional networks grow and flourish.

In this informal conversation, which might even include brief roleplays, we'll explore how this could apply to those who research or teach as well as those who choose government or other direct public service work.  
Read more