Nissan México president Mayra González, the first woman to lead a country subsidiary of the Japanese auto maker, is off to Japan to take up a new post as head of the company’s global sales.

After graduating with a degree in marketing from the Monterrey Technological Institute, González, 40, began her career as a salesperson at an automotive dealership, and started working in sales at Nissan in 2001.

She worked her way up in the company to become the first woman on the company’s operations committee in 2012, and president in 2016.

Looking back on her presidency, she thinks she successfully led the company through a difficult time.

“I think that when I started leading the company, I was driving a ship through calm waters,” she said. “But then we went into a stormy ocean, and there were a lot of complications. And more than what I brought, I think that what I focused on was creating the right team to pilot that ship as best as possible, and that’s what we’ve done.”

She believes it was her achievements during her career that propelled her into the president’s job “and not because of a plan to present an image of diversity in the company,” she told the newspaper El Universal.

Source: El Financiero (sp), El Universal (sp)