Generation X is in charge. Don’t make a big deal of it.

“The single best predictor of people’s success at work is their boss’s competence, regardless of generation,” says Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of Raw Signal Group, a management training company. “That boss is there for their onboarding, their feedback, their career growth and more. If the boss can’t do those things, they’re screwed.

But as old bosses leave and new ones arrive, there are opportunities to rethink. Employees who benefit from leaving the office early to be picked up at school can say so. Employees who want more feedback can ask for it. There is an opportunity to look at the way things have always been done and ask: Why?

“Many experts make it sound like you’re pigeonholing people based on their year of birth, but what we want people to understand is that generations are clues, not pigeonholes,” says Jason Dorsey, a researcher at the work. “Just because you were born in a certain year doesn’t mean anyone knows everything about you.”

Generations also change as they get older. Generation X seemed for years to be defined by a tortured sense of purposelessness. As Winona Ryder’s character in “Reality Bites” puts it, “I was really going to be something by the age of 23.” The fear is diminishing for many. Create a sense of trust in the workplace; they became something.

Twilla Brooks, 48, recalled that when she started her career as an assistant buyer for Robinsons-May, a former department store chain, she had to be in the office before her boss arrived and stay until her boss left. She raced through Los Angeles traffic before 8 a.m., terrified of letting her manager down because, in her words, “That’s what you had to do to make it.”

Last year Mrs. Brooks an executive role at Walmart to start her own marketing company. Now that she no longer has an office, she decides where and when she works. “There’s a lot more flexibility in my schedule,” she said. “Because it’s my schedule.”