In a spacious office at the headquarters of the National Football League on Park Avenue, down a hallway where helmets and other emblems of testosterone-fueled glory gleam in glass cases, Kimberly Williams, clad in a simple pinstripe suit and demure pearl earrings, exudes calm determination. As senior vice president of finance for the league, Ms. Williams is, at age 35, the most senior finance executive at the NFL.

When discussing her rapid ascent in the business world, Ms. Williams emphasizes attention to detail and pride in a job well done, as well as interpersonal skills and sensitivity – rather than a cutthroat attitude that one might expect of a woman succeeding in a prototypically male environment.

“It’s a testament to this organization that I can be myself, and not that take-no-prisoners type,” said Ms. Williams. “At the end of the day, results are what matters.”

And Ms. Williams gets results. She supervises 35 people, most of whom manage their own departments. She also provides analysis of ways the league can enhance its revenue, like accelerating marketing efforts. And she manages the NFL’s budget.

Surprisingly, she maintains that her success has not arisen from rigid planning.

“My career has been opportunistic, as opposed to planned along the lines of a management textbook,” she says.

While she was always good with numbers, as a child she was more intrigued by foreign culture than algebra. She says that pursuing her passion – rather than a conscious plan to shatter the proverbial glass ceiling – brought her to this point in her career.

She graduated from Connecticut College with a degree in Japanese and Asian studies and spent a year studying and working in Japan. After putting in a year at a New York City law firm, she got an MBA at The American Graduate School of International Management, commonly known as “Thunderbird,” outside Phoenix, Ariz.

Upon graduation, General Electric offered her a job as a London based financial analyst. Because GE needed her to start work immediately, and she and her boyfriend, Geoffrey, were engaged, the couple decided to steamroll ahead and planned their wedding in just 10 days. Her parents, she remembers, were concerned that marriage would derail her career ambitions.

“But I told them, ‘If I am going to have this career, and travel, how much better it would be to do it with someone I love” she recalls.

When Ms. Williams was 25, GE recruited her to help spearhead the integration of Nuovo Pignone, a heavy manufacturing business specializing in power systems, which GE had purchased from the Italian government. Overseeing this integration in Florence, Italy, with another young woman, Ms. Williams encountered some resistance from male colleagues.

“You’d walk into the cafeteria filled with 3,000 employees, almost all of whom were men, and every eye would be on you,” Ms. Williams remembers. “There was this sense of, ‘Oh, General Electric, this enormous multinational company that

has just taken over our company, has sent these two young women, and they can’t possibly understand [how to manage this situation].’

“But over time I established myself and they accepted my competence.”

Because her father, an Italian-American Drug Enforcement agent working for the American government, was stationed in Milan, Italy, during her high school years, Ms. Williams had become a fluent speaker of Italian.

“The fact that I spoke Italian was 99% of the reason GE hired me to oversee the integration of Nuovo Pignone,” she says.

The ability to overcome cultural and interpersonal barriers is a strength on which she prides herself, and which she seeks when hiring others.

“If I need a problem solved, someone who has lived different places, and held different jobs tends to be able to provide a more sophisticated analysis than someone who hasn’t.”

In 1997, she returned to America to work for the National Broadcasting Company as director of finance for NBC’s Broadcast and Network Operations. She went on to hold several positions at NBC, including vice president and chief financial officer, NBC Business Development. In that capacity, her responsibilities included evaluating the viability of launching new shows. She weighed in on the much-publicized decision to pay actors on the popular sitcom “Friends” $1 million an episode.

“They were worth every penny,” she said.

In 2003, she accepted her current position as senior vice president of finance for the National Football League.

While it’s not uncommon for her to be the only woman in a meeting room of NFL execs and owners, Ms. Williams says she has seldom encountered sexism in her work at the NFL. Occasionally, people will kid her about her youth, but this has not presented a serious obstacle.

For their part, her co-workers sing her praises.

“Kim came to the NFL with an impeccable track record, and she has exceeded the lofty expectations we had for her,” said president and CFO of the NFL network, Steve Bornstein.

When asked how she would advise young women in business, she says she would give the same two pieces of advice to young women and young men: “First: when your learning curve plateaus, seek another challenge (that doesn’t necessarily mean change jobs). And second, Seek the opportunity that takes you outside your comfort zone.”

So with all this challenge, where is her comfort zone?

These days, as usual, it is with her husband, Geoffrey Williams, a writer, and the couple’s golden retriever, Mac. The couple maintains a home on the Caribbean island of Turks and Caicos in addition to their apartment in New York, and Ms. Williams says she tries to visit their island home at least once every couple of months. On the island, she says, she loves to snorkel, eat well, and relax.

“When I go down [to the island], people at work say, ‘You’re coming back, right?’ because they know that part of me longs for that simple life with my husband and dog [to just continue],” she says. “That lifestyle is like my dream.”

She pauses and smiles amid mountains of neatly organized files and gleaming shelves in her midtown office.

“Maybe someday.”