Sounds like he had a good manager. You've heard the saying:
Give the employee only enough rope to hang himself, but not enough rope that he can hang the company. I've learned far more from my failures than successes and your ability to recover from a failure shows even more than either the success or the failure.
I've had many - some good and some not so good (my current one is one of the best I've had).
The best ones typically trust me to do my job well and would back me up if I got into trouble. They also assumed that I screwed up and they needed to know about it, I would let them know first.
