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Mary-Ann Anyikam has spent 25 years building resilience - personally and professionally. As HP’s Director of Global Resilience and an Industry Expert-in-Residence at Tulane’s A.B. Freeman School of Business, she’s spent her career helping organizations prevent fraud and withstand crises. But long before resilience was in her title, she was managing a global, travel-heavy forensic investigations career while raising twins - and she has specific, tactical advice for anyone trying to do the same.
Mary-Ann never considered leaving the workforce, even at 80-90% travel when she had her twins and with a husband who traveled just as much. What she did instead was renegotiate the terms - the amount of travel, the length of trips, who covered what at home - again and again, as her kids moved through different seasons. Her story is a playbook for staying ambitious through a demanding, travel-heavy career without pretending the travel doesn’t cost anything.
Negotiate Your Travel Before Anyone Asks You To
When Mary-Ann first got pregnant with twins, she didn’t wait for her employer to bring up accommodations. She walked into the conversation with a plan. Her partner at PwC met her halfway and then some, restructuring her trips to Tuesday-through-Friday instead of full weeks, and committing in advance to staff her on a local project when she returned from leave.
“She said, I know you’re going to worry about what happens when you get back from maternity leave. I just want to let you know that’s one less thing for you to worry about. You tell me what you want that to look like.”
Her advice: don’t wait to be handed a policy. Come to the conversation with the shape of what would work for you, and treat travel as something you can actively redesign - trip length, timing, and cadence - rather than something you either accept in full or opt out of entirely.
Build a Household System for Who Travels When
Once both Mary-Ann and her husband were traveling for work, they needed a system that didn’t require renegotiating every single trip. Their rule: whoever gets a trip on the family calendar first gets priority, and the other parent rearranges around it.
“Whoever gets it on the calendar first, you call first dibs on it, right? And so we live and breathe by the family calendar, and we still do.”
She also set specific parameters that evolved with her kids’ ages: no consecutive weeks of travel while they were under two, international trips capped around three days when the kids were young, and more flexibility to be gone a full week once they were older. The system wasn’t about eliminating travel - it was about making the trade-offs visible and fair, rather than relitigating them every time.
Taper the Role, Not the Ambition
When the travel and the parenting math stopped working, Mary-Ann didn’t step off her career path. Instead, she deliberately re-routed it while staying honest with herself about the things that were non-negotiable in her work and made it more enjoyable. For her, this was working on complex and strategic assignments, and on a travel schedule that worked for her family priorities at any given time. At first, she moved to a local project to cut travel - then she made the harder call to leave a year later because that role had become less complex and engaging than what she wanted.
“I wanted to do it with a smaller firm where I could help them grow the practice, travel minimally, but still be neck deep in forensics, which was really what I loved about what I did.”
That move - trading a bigger firm for a smaller one that still let her do meaningful, complex work with less travel - is core to her advice for anyone in a demanding global role during peak parenting years: look for the version of the job that keeps the part you love while cutting the part that’s costing you the most, rather than assuming your only options are the full-travel role or not having an ambitious role at all.
Defining Your Why, And Letting it Shape Your Decisions
None of Mary-Ann’s tapering decisions came from a single moment of clarity - they came from repeatedly checking her choices against a clear sense of purpose. For most of her children’s early lives, her why was building a stable, present environment for them, which is what made it not just possible, but ideal, to accept smaller firms or less prestigious projects.
Once her kids got their driver’s licenses and the hours she used to spend on gymnastics bleachers opened back up, she started asking a different question - not what her kids needed, but what she did. Her advice: don’t treat your why as something to define once and defend forever. Revisit it deliberately at each new season, and let your career decisions follow it rather than a fixed idea of what ambition - or motherhood - is supposed to look like.
Let a Mentor Draw the Boundary You Can’t See
Some of Mary-Ann’s most important limits weren’t ones she set herself - they were named for her by someone watching from the outside. Early in a newly-expanded global role at HP, she was working round the clock: late-night calls with one region, early-morning calls with another, daycare pickups squeezed in between. A peer who had lived through his own struggle to have children noticed and confronted her directly, making her pull up her calendar on the spot and block off two and a half hours every evening as untouchable.
“He said, ‘it’s nobody’s business. You call it personal time...’ It’s still my sacred block.”
Within days, her director and the company’s anti-corruption counsel separately reinforced the same message. That experience now shapes how Mary-Ann mentors others: she doesn’t wait for the women on her team to ask for help setting boundaries around travel and time. She builds the relationship early - often before someone has children at all - so that when the moment comes, she can name the limit before it becomes a crisis.
“We don’t need to wait for them to ask. Sometimes we can help them identify what those boundaries should be.”
Mary-Ann’s Leadership Tips:
Look for the role that keeps your ambition, even if you reduce the travel - not one or the other. Tapering doesn’t have to mean stepping off your path; it means finding the version of the work that fits the season you’re in. Consider that what you want is possible before discounting it.
Define and revisit your why at each new season. Defining your why can help make tradeoffs easier and more clear in high stakes moments - and may evolve alongside your parenting journey.
Find a mentor who will name your limits for you. The boundaries you can’t see for yourself are often obvious to someone else - build these mentor relationships before you’re in crisis, not after.
About Mary-Ann Anyikam
Mary-Ann Anyikam is a global executive, speaker, and board director with more than 25 years of experience in crisis leadership, risk, and organizational resilience. She currently serves as Director of Global Resilience at HP, where she leads enterprise resilience strategy across HP’s global operations, and is an Industry Expert-in-Residence at Tulane University's A.B. Freeman School of Business.
Beyond her corporate work, Mary-Ann is passionate about helping ambitious women build careers and lives they can sustain. Having raised twins while navigating an increasingly global and demanding career, she brings both lived experience and hindsight to conversations about motherhood, ambition, choices, and what it actually takes to make it work.
Her guiding philosophy is simple: “know your why and remember your why.” She believes there is no perfect balance and that we cannot optimize everything at once. Instead, building a full life requires intentional choices, an understanding of seasons, and the support systems that allow us to keep growing without losing sight of what matters most.
