Photo By Ryan Smith | Mark Roth, technical director for the Spectrum Warfare Department at Naval Air Warfare...... read more read more
Mark Roth wanted to build tractors.
Growing up on a farm in Nebraska, he earned a mechanical engineering degree with one dream: build the next great tractor.
By the time he graduated, the agricultural economy had tanked. The company he loved was out of business.
So when a recruiter talked about the mission, Roth listened. He started at Point Mugu in 1985.
Forty years later, he is still listening. He never built tractors. He built something else. He built people.
On Jan. 21, Naval Air Systems Command recognized Roth, technical director for the Spectrum Warfare Department, as Point Mugu’s Mentor of the Year.
“I joke and say they got the wrong Mark,” Roth said. “I'm honored and humbled. I never set out to be a mentor, but people are how we get stuff done.”
He figured that out a long time ago.
The mediator
Roth first saw it clearly around 1988.
He wasn’t a supervisor yet, just a team leader.
One afternoon, his boss called him into the office. He was in the middle of a shouting match with a colleague. The yelling was so loud everyone outside could hear it through the closed door.
"I need you to mediate between us," his boss said.
Roth sat down. He didn't interrupt. He didn't take sides. He listened. After about 20 minutes, he looked at both men.
"You guys realize you're agreeing," Roth told them. "You're saying the same thing in different ways." Within 40 minutes, all three walked out aligned.
Roth realized he had something.
“I can help people align, hear each other, listen to each other,” Roth said. “That event still sticks out in my mind.”
He didn’t give them an answer that day. He helped them find it themselves. That’s still his approach.
The whiteboard and the option offense
In the early 2000s, he took a facilitative leadership course that taught him how to break down problems visually.
That’s where the whiteboard comes in.
Walk into Roth's office and the whiteboard tells you everything: shapes and arrows, notes in different colors, like a football play drawn up before the snap.
On the farm, everybody had a job. If one person stopped, the work stopped. On Saturdays, he saw the same thing in Tom Osborne’s I-option offense at the University of Nebraska. Every role mattered. The blocks on the outside. The back who did not get the ball but still sold the fake.
His whiteboard breaks it down the same way.
“What does each player do? What’s their role on every play?” Roth said.
On the board, the players are engineers, analysts, program managers, and test leads. Everyone has a box.
Everyone has a job.
When someone walks in stuck, Roth grabs a marker. He breaks the problem down so they can see the pieces.
“You’re just decomposing the problem, helping them understand,” Roth said. “They know a whole lot more than they think they do.”
“What legacy do you want to leave?”
Aziz Awwad needed to hear that.
Awwad nominated Roth for Mentor of the Year while preparing for retirement. The two worked with each other for a quarter century.
He saw that whiteboard up close.
Around 2021, Awwad came to Roth unsure about his career. He had ambition but no direction. When Awwad was up for division head of Mission Data Information, he hesitated.
“I could see that he had something to offer,” Roth said. “I had the chance to observe how Aziz listened to others, and he was always very collaborative. He may not have seen that in himself, but I could certainly see that.”
Roth told him directly.
“No, Aziz, you’re the right person for that job.”
One moment stands out for Awwad.
"He asked me, 'What legacy do you want to leave behind?'" Awwad said. "No one had ever framed my career that way before."
That question shifted everything.
It made Awwad think about the leader he wanted to become. Those conversations led Awwad to the division head role, something he says he never would have pursued without Roth’s guidance.
Then came the project that nearly broke him.
$2 million to $24 million
When a project started slipping, there was real talk about pulling it from Awwad's division and handing it to a contractor.
He felt overwhelmed. He felt like something important was slipping through his fingers.
Roth stepped in. He spent hours with Awwad, not giving answers but asking questions. What's actually blocking progress? Which parts are salvageable? Where do you need support?
They worked through the pieces on the whiteboard. They found the moves that still made sense.
They turned it around. The portfolio grew from $2 million to $24 million.
It kept that mission data work in-house at Point Mugu.
After four years as a division head, Awwad retired in December.
“Mark is the kind of mentor who doesn’t give you answers but asks the questions that transform your confidence, your leadership and ultimately your entire career,” Awwad said.
Time that pays
Roth invests time. Serious time.
Dr. Balaji Iyer, division head of Aircraft and Spectrum Integration Environments, has known Roth for 19 years. Iyer and his colleagues prepared briefs for senior leaders. Roth mentored them through it.
Some briefs took tens of hours. One took more than 100 hours.
Roth would sit with them and go line by line to make sure the message was on target for the audience.
“Communication is so important, and that’s why I invest in it,” Roth said.
He makes a point to connect daily tasks to the larger mission. In his view, people perform better when they understand why their work matters to the warfighter.
“If we’re pulling in the same direction, amazing things can happen,” Roth said.
Iyer saw that alignment shape his own career.
Roth gave Iyer assignments: white papers, presentations. He reviewed them, then met to talk through improvements. He did the same for Iyer’s colleagues when they prepared proposals for sponsors.
Roth also made Iyer look at himself.
Where are your gaps? What should you pursue next? Iyer started chasing opportunities he wouldn’t have seen on his own.
Iyer nominated Roth for the mentoring he received in 2025, but he’d seen it long before that.
“The basis of my recommendation stemmed from the years of mentoring that Mark has done across many levels of our organization,” Iyer said.
A way of being
Roth’s philosophy is simple: help people create their own destiny while providing support along the way. He doesn’t tell people what to do. He asks questions that help them find their own answers.
When things go right, he steps back. The credit belongs to them.
Ask Roth what a mentor is, and he keeps it simple.
“A subtle shift that a person makes to give rather than always receive,” Roth said. “Mentoring needs to be a way of being.”
It can happen anywhere: the parking lot, the hallway, the office.
Both of his nominators saw it. That’s why they nominated him.
The Nebraska farm kid never got his chance to build tractors. He got something better.
He got to build people.
“At the end of the day, we are an organization of people,” Roth said. “And mentoring is one way we all get the best out of each other.”
| Date Taken: | 01.29.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 01.29.2026 15:14 |
| Story ID: | 557084 |
| Location: | POINT MUGU NAWC, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 25 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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